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.
May 31, 2009 at 10:45 pm
An SAP / D&B relationship would be a boon for SAP customers if it goes beyond a simple re-seller agreement (anyone can do that). They need to leverage third-party info within the context of the processes of their emerging applications — not just for parent/child enrichment and classification. There are some great minds on the SAP team when it comes to pulling, presenting and analyzing internal metrics around risk (e.g., performance, escapes, PPM, on-time delivery) in the supply chain as well as overall spend visibility. Problem is, SAP overall still seems very enterprise centric and these would seem to be minority voices. D&B and their competitors represent the world outside the four walls — something SAP must think much more about going forward if they are to increase their penetration outside of transactional enablement for P2P. If they can pull it off, this could signal a future direction for SAP overall outside of just procurement and supply chain. In the world of dying $500 million ERP upgrades, this really is a do or die (death by Redmond acquisition that is).
June 1, 2009 at 2:22 pm
True, SAP is indeed enterprise centric and I doubt that this is something that will change in the near future. Turning a tanker around takes time.
Yet the fact that customizable scorecards that can pull data from external sources, compile the metrics generated by these sources with internal metrics, weigh each metric individually as well as per section in order to get a single (as well as detailed) KPI on supplier performance and risk can very well be exploited by end-users smart enough to dig deep into the SAP functionality. And keeping in mind the number of unused SAP-licenses floating around there is a great potential available that often sits unused. I can also see a future where the capabilities to compile external data can be used for other causes as well such as green procurement and csr-monitoring.