Yesterday Jason Busch at Spend Matters (D&B: Powering Multiple Spend and Supply Risk Offerings) provided some insight into D&B:s strategies going forward with their supply management solutions:
In a recent conversation with D&B’s Jim Lawton, who serves as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Supply Management Solutions (SMS) business unit, I confirmed D&B is moving to a “D&B inside” model to enable supply management and spend visibility providers to leverage D&B data to help customers move toward more strategic risk management.
Now this is great news, managing supply risk is so much more than just having data readily available at your fingertips and what D&B now are moving towards is a model which enables those with experience, know-how and process knowledge with better data which in turns leads to better value for the customers.
It is also something that goes hand in hand with some of the functionality available in SAP SRM 7.0 (which analysts and bloggers alike will surely explore now that it is on the market). SAP now provide for a bird’s eye view on supplier management through custom scorecards which can aggregate data from numerous sources such as D&B. No doubt will D&B’s proposed openness add even more value to applications such as SAP – what still needs to be seen is how and when the SAP supply chain partners pick up this lead and how they will attempt to exploit the possibilities. Because when (and if) they do; that is when the real value will come alive to the customers.
