SIM Made Simple is the resource area for best practices in supplier information management (SIM)– derived from our experience in managing SIM for over 1 million suppliers for some of the world's largest companies.
January 20, 2010
Supplier and Buyer Hierarchies Are Here!
Last week, we dropped one of the largest product releases in Aravo's history. Of the many new features in Aravo SIM, I am particularly excited about the functionality that supports both supplier and buyer hierarchies to better manage the complex relationships between suppliers and their subsidiaries, as well as among different groups within buying organizations. With our new Business Relationship Mapping functionality, users can manage unique profiles for each contracted relationship between a buying organization and an individual supplier, configure custom attributes for different business relationships and map relationships based on any combination of Business Unit, Geography or Commodity. Users can also create a custom hierarchy.
Today, you might have a relationship with an IT hardware, software and services provider. That IT provider may have developed the customized software that runs your trading desk; it might also provide outsourced IT Help Desk support for your ERP system, and could even be the company that sold you all the servers for one of your backup server farms.
Most companies today have had to make trade-offs as they consolidate their supplier management data, systems and processes. Either they consolidate supplier records and lose the ability to distinguish the various operational, sourcing and contractual relationships they have with a single supplier OR they record each relationship separately without benefit of a single supplier roll-up to assess issues such as business criticality, supplier risk impact and compliance to external regulations. With Aravo SIM's new Business Relationship Mapping functionality, companies can now do both.
