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Emptoris Expands Procurement Software Portfolio

by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 4:47:00 PM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

Hoping to take strategic sourcing to a new level, Emptoris, Inc. today expanded its procurement software portfolio with the release of Emptoris 7, a scalable contract management suite that adds such functions as supplier performance measurements, best-value negotiation, and global program management.

Emptoris, which was a Managing Automation Company to Watch in 2005, already offered a software suite that includes sourcing, contract management, and spend analysis, but the company says Emptoris 7 is its most significant release to date. The new release adds functionality related to supplier assessment and trend analysis. The company is also rolling out three versions of the software — referred to as the on-ramp offerings — that will allow companies to get up-and-running easily and expand functionality as business needs grow.

The three versions are Emptoris Basic, a nuts-and-bolts version delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS); Emptoris Professional, also delivered in the SaaS model, which expands the capabilities and services for companies moving to the next level of supply and contract management; and Emptoris Enterprise, which provides capabilities for companies looking to take their supply and contract management programs to the highest levels of value. The Enterprise version is available as either a service (SaaS) or deployed on-premise.

While pricing was not available, each of the three editions is built on the same code base, allowing customers to scale the system without having to migrate to a new application.

"A company may want to start with the basic offering, because they just want a little functionality, but once they get going and the team sees it's effective, what's next? We throw a few switches and move them from basic to professional," said Emptoris Vice President of Marketing Kevin Potts, in an interview with Managing Automation. "And when they want the new capabilities of the Enterprise edition, we can quickly turn it on and expose them to additional functionality. If then they want to move behind the firewall in order to integrate with other systems while maintaining the same look-and-feel, we can move them over without the heavy cost of migration."

New capabilities of Emptoris 7 include multilateral views across spend, contracts, compliance, and supplier performance. An expanded supplier performance scorecard factors in contract-driven performance measurements and contract-violation reporting based on dates or payment terms, for example. It can also track spending against supplier performance, which can help the buyer decide if it needs to reallocate spend to a better supplier, the company says.

While price is important, Emptoris officials emphasize that manufacturers need a better way to monitor and manage supplier relationships.

"In the past, a lot of companies used software to negotiate around price for reverse auctions," Potts told Managing Automation. "While price is an important component, other elements have to factor in, such as vendor risk, or [identifying] who is the high-performing vendor they should be working with. Another challenge is being able to manage programs and communicate at a global level, as well as how to track against the contract terms negotiated."

To that end, the Emptoris offering includes a supplier self-assessment feature that can analyze root causes of problems based on configurable, multi-step supplier interviews, and best practices templates. A supplier portal lets suppliers see how they rank relative to their peers.

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