Commerce One delivers strategic sourcing solution

Commerce One has developed Commerce One Source, a comprehensive sourcing solution designed to deliver rapid return on investment (ROI) by enhancing visibility and control across the entire sourcing process for direct and indirect materials and services.

Commerce One Source is powered by a unique, integrated business process engine, enabling the creation of business process flows tailored to support industries, companies and even individual supplier relationships. These process flows help organisations to construct simplified, repeatable processes across the enterprise, creating the opportunity for new levels of efficiency and ROI.

Built on the company's proven e-commerce platform, Commerce One Source helps enterprises automate and orchestrate critical sourcing and negotiation processes within the organisation and extend them onto the Internet to connect with trading partners. These capabilities are designed to deliver ROI through faster time-to-market for products, reduced cost for goods and services and faster production cycles through better communication, negotiation and contract compliance.

"Commerce One Source combines new, competitively distinct sourcing capabilities with Commerce One's proven e-commerce platform," said Riaz Osman, Accounts Executive at Commerce One South Africa - Distributor Operations. "This combination enables enterprises to extend their visibility and control over the entire strategic sourcing process, while connecting silos of information and action both inside the enterprise and with trading partners anywhere, anytime."

The Commerce One e-commerce platform also provides integration with existing enterprise ERP and supply chain applications, along with the full suite of Commerce One procurement and e-commerce solutions, to automate the complete source-to-pay process. Unlike traditional e-commerce solutions, the Commerce One platform provides business process management capabilities to coordinate sourcing processes across multiple organisations and enterprise applications.

"In today's down economy, e-Sourcing provides one of the most rapid and direct means for companies to identify and achieve hard-dollar cost savings," said Tim Minahan, vice-president, Supply Chain Research, Aberdeen Group. "With Commerce One Source, Commerce One has expanded on its traditional online negotiation and auction capabilities to support more sophisticated and complex sourcing collaboration and decision support capabilities. Together, these components provide a compelling platform for addressing the complete sourcing cycle -- from spending analysis through contract award and management."

Key capabilities of Commerce One Source include:

Sourcing

Guides an enterprise through the complete sourcing cycle, using sophisticated supplier management tools to gather critical information about suppliers. Easy-to-use RFx and project management capabilities speed the negotiation process. The application is designed to enable enterprises to improve collaboration with suppliers throughout the bidding and negotiation processes and to help buyers make the best decisions.

Features include:

RFx (requests for information, proposal and quote) Allows buyers to build complex bid packages. Buyers can bundle line items and specify criteria; suppliers can bid on partial or complete packages.

Negotiation

Provides structured one-on-one negotiation capabilities.

Quotation analysis

Supports "what if" scenarios and allows comparison of bid packages.

Supplier performance management

Provides tools for rating, categorising, analysing and tracking supplier performance.

Sourcing activity reporting

Capabilities range from basic process activity reports to spend and performance analysis by line item, commodity and supplier.

Auction

Reverse auction supports both strategic and ad-hoc sourcing efforts including real-time interactive bidding for direct and indirect goods and services. Enhanced multi-variable bidding allows buyers to analyse incoming bids by rank, weight and user-defined formulas. The module handles a variety of auction types and bids to source anything from commodity items to complex engineered goods.

Sourcing intelligence

Sourcing Intelligence allows buyers to analyse spending by commodity, supplier, project or contract. The module enables in-depth analysis, ensuring enterprises have the information required to develop an effective sourcing strategy.

Contract Management encompasses the entire lifecycle of the contract, providing tools for creation, review, negotiation, award and management. Analysis tools improve contract compliance through supplier performance ratings for attributes such as price, delivery and quality.

The Commerce One Platform

Commerce One Source is built on the Commerce One platform, an integration and e-commerce platform that links and orchestrates enterprise legacy applications and interaction with trading partners. The platform provides seamless, real-time information exchange to automate and streamline business processes within and outside the enterprise.