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Understanding and managing the many complexities of eProcurement is what the highly-sophisticated Enable Systems solution and tools offer. We provide all areas of eCommerce, ranging from eProcurement to catalog content development services to helping customers establish private on-line market places or to simply give business partners a chance to take advantage of our “public” marketplace, TechSeeker. Each of our solutions is suited for independent implementation, yet they are designed to complement the entire procurement process when combined for a total procurement solution.
Enable Systems’ eProcurement solution, EnablePro, provides a robust software suite, hosting of that software and services required to support immediate customer implementation.
Features & Benefits
In the ongoing battle to cut costs and improve profitability, businesses are now evaluating manual operations processes that can be automated for higher efficiency and better resource allocation. Industry analysts report that 40% of total costs incurred for procuring indirect goods and services come solely from the processing of purchase orders.* (*PriceWaterhouseCoopers)
Your organization can reduce these unnecessary expenses by implementing an effective procurement strategy and utilizing the right tools for automating, controlling and analyzing the purchase of goods and services. Enable Systems has the tools in place that address this operations issue: EnablePro
eProcurement.
EnablePro
eProcurement
EnablePro is a web-hosted electronic procurement solution with a robust
software platform that offers easy eProcurement activation, requires
minimal setup investment, and efficiently automates customer-defined order
processing with built-in approval constraints. Encompassed within the
solution are software, services and support that elevate our model for
successful process management, including: order management services,
system set-up and training, supplier contract management, optional
back-end systems integration, automated maintenance and settlement
services with reporting.
The simple methodology of the EnablePro solution is to give your
corporate decision-makers better control with these benefits:
- Set the rules for purchase authorizations to decrease order
processing costs. With EnablePro, you can control and streamline
purchasing by empowering employees to requisition goods and
services. Employees can easily adhere to corporate ordering rights
and amounts that are built in to the EnablePro system for automatic
approval escalations. This decreases approval bottlenecks and cuts
wasted employee time spent on the paper-tracking of orders.
- Improve supplier partnerships
for leveraging stronger
relationships and negotiating better prices. Leverage stronger
relationships with suppliers by choosing your partners and giving your
employees access to only their available goods – on-line and quickly.
As purchasing patterns are consolidated and reported, activity and
satisfaction levels can be evaluated by your purchasing managers for
better contract negotiations.
- Centralize purchasing to adhere to standards and contracts,
therefore eliminating maverick spending. With the EnablePro
solution, your organization retains purchasing control by utilizing
a single source for all indirect spending. Electronically
streamlining this process with built-in constraints helps eliminate
maverick spending and off-contract ordering.
These factors all lead to increased company profitability through a
decreased SG&A cost structure.
EnableBuyer
The EnableBuyer software is the underlying architecture that allows us
to deliver the user experience. Included in this software are a number of
tools required to deliver a robust offering to a wide variety of users.
Some of the key components are as follows:
- Seeker Search Engine:
The Enable Systems parametric search
engine has been optimized to search across the multiple supplier
catalogs for any given vertical. The search engine is optimized to work
across our attribute based product data.
It works as follows: Users select the manner in which they wish to
begin their search. They can either choose a keyword search or search
by drill down category. Once preliminary results have been returned, we
allow the users the ability to "further define" their search
against the attributes. For example, a user might select "Notebook
Computers with Active Matrix Displays" as a keyword search. This
might lead to 250 results. At the time the results are returned to the
user, we also return the dynamic parametric search engine. This engine
would be populated with the attributes that are specific and meaningful
to the results of "Notebook Computers with Active Matrix
Displays". These attributes might be hard drive size, screen size,
weight, processor speed, manufacturer and so on. Included with the
attribute names would be potential attribute values. By selecting the
attributes and the associated values, the user is able to quickly and
easily narrow the search to the proper equipment that best suits their
requirements. The entire process results in users that are satisfied
with the searching process and have easily determined the best product
for their needs.
- Comparison Functionality:
Comparison functions are available
for all technology-based and related verticals. In addition, you may
elect normalized content management for other non-technology verticals
and new suppliers to be provided by Enable Systems. This normalized
content supports comprehensive attribute-level comparisons – up to
100 attributes for more complex products.
- Acquisition Assistant:
EnableBuyer’s Acquisition Assistant
provides an easily administered, rules based workflow tool. This component
of the solution is easily customized by a client administrator to mirror
virtually any set of approval purchasing rules. Approvers are notified of
an order pending their approval via email and have the right to approve,
deny, or even abstain an order. The emphasis on this module is on company
administration and maintenance.
Intelligent Decision
Agent
The Intelligent Decision Agent (IDA) is our tool that allows companies to take control of their business processes for procuring goods and services. The IDA is intended to allow companies the ability to institutionalize a professional procurement process across a wide variety of users. The IDA is a rules based engine that can allow companies to take control of the buying process, insuring compliance, proper supplier selection and other key governing issues.
The technology works by allowing customers to identify their key business rules and manage these rules across a large number of suppliers and end users. When deploying the IDA, the customer pre-defines key business rules that properly manage their procurement process. These rules would take into account how the company wants to transact business. This can be concentrated on a single strategic theme, or across a large number of themes. For example, a customer might define a series of rules like "Purchase from lowest cost vendor if price is 3% lower than Vendor A – a minority vendor” or “Purchase 75% of all goods from Vendor A” or “ Ship items using my Fed Ex number” or even “ Electronically validate that we have not exceeded budget in this category”.
While the key component to the IDA is the buying company’s business rules, it is also important that we capture the supplier business rules that would pertain to the various customer business rules. Specific rules that are needed to be captured are “specific price files for customers”, “return policies”, “shipping rules” and other similar rules.
Once the rules of both the customer and the suppliers are created, the IDA will then match the rules to determine the appropriate response. These responses will be keyed up and held for display in EnableBuyer. Then based on the implementation methodology selected, the user will either receive a result set to continue searching on (including parametric searching), or the product will be ordered directly form the selected Supplier.
In either deployment process, the company will have insured that its procurement process is adhered to and all users are in full compliance with company policies.
In addition to users who are searching for products, the IDA can also be managed through a system to system connection where there is no requesting user. An example of this would be to purchase goods when levels of minimum on hand quantities drops below a predetermined number. The system used to manage inventory might kick out an auto-request to purchase the goods in question. The IDA would then execute the business rules and select the appropriate supplier to purchase the goods from, electronically execute the purchase order and process the order without human intervention.
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