Intellimas Review

1. Spreadsheet madness

A Sourcing Director of Company A is trying to get her Request for Quotes (RFQ’s) updated from her vendors and internal staff so that they can evaluate expected product margins. This will help the company determine whether to make the product or not. The Director is having an awful time tracking down the RFQ spreadsheets and which version of them is correct. Not only that, but every spreadsheet has a different format and calculations. They have no choice but to go into product meetings not knowing whether they have the most accurate information. They tried on-line spreadsheets for this process but they had to re-key lots of data that already existed in other systems. They tried sharepoint and had issues with the check-in process as well as redundant data issues.

Finally they purchased Intellimas. Singletree’s implementation specialist worked with the IT and Business team and determined where to pull the product data and other related elements. Then they reviewed the current process and discussed best practices and baked all of that into the Intellimas entity. Now the Sourcing Director can see where her process stands at a click of a button and drill down into any issues. She can also use the application in meetings, perform what-if analysis, and make buy decisions on-line. She also has an emailed report sent to her every morning to gain visibility into overall margins. Best of all, her staff loves the product because it has the look and feel of a spreadsheet and has exception views, and IT loves it because it has a database, built-in integration, and it establishes a repeatable process.

Features used: SQL entity, calculations and rollups, spreadsheet look and feel, exception views, database scheduled reports.

2. Spread the wealth

Company A’s Supply Chain Director has seen the rapid progress with the RFQ process, due to the Sourcing Director’s decision to use Intellimas. He has a problem with his Work in Process (WIP) Tracking process, where vendors provide the status of their items being produced. He needs this status updated daily for each PO so that he can ensure that customers will ultimately receive their goods on time. He currently uses his enterprise system to manage this process. The vendors log into the enterprise system through a web portal but are finding it difficult to update data in the portal. Their workflow within the portal is to search for a PO, update the dates and other statuses on the screen, and save. Then they start the whole process over again for the next PO, and they could be updating many PO’s in a day.

So the Supply Chain Director and the IT team engaged with Singletree to build a WIP Tracking entity which pulls PO data from the enterprise system, combines it with user-defined fields for the vendors to update the status data, and adds some additional functions the users always wanted. Then the data is integrated back to the enterprise system using a web service. Now the vendors can update many PO’s at one time and they love the copy feature. And internal users use their exception views to see when PO tasks are due and alerts to see when PO’s are running late.

Features used: SQL entity, service bus integration, spreadsheet look and feel, exception views, alerts, database.

3. Point solution

Company Z has a need for a Vendor Compliance system. They would like to eliminate their manual process and manage their supplier C-TPAT, social compliance, and various other types of audits. They are currently having a very hard time managing the scheduling and the following up of open compliance issues. They looked at several off the shelf solutions but they don’t meet their requirements. They have a very specific process that needs to be handled and none of the software vendors have this functionality. They reached out to Singletree as they saw on their website that they have a standard solution for Vendor Compliance.

They were relieved to determine that the Intellimas Solution can be easily re-configured to align completely with their process and also that the UI looked very similar to their existing spreadsheets. Singletree took their out of the box solution and updated the business logic in the configuration engine based on Company Z’s requirements. Company Z can now handle all of their various audit types in Intellimas. Better yet the system was configured with Company Z’s scheduling logic so this happens automatically with alerts. They can also take advantage of the out of the box audit issue management function to ensure that vendors are always working toward being in 100% compliance.

Features used: Out of the box solution, Configuration engine, alerts, spreadsheet look and feel.