The survey, which queried senior IT leaders in the UK, Switzerland, Holland and the Nordics, revealed 76 percent of IT leaders are considering renegotiating or re-tendering two or more of their outsource contracts.

Twenty-six percent said they were dissatisfied with one or more of their IT outsourcing contracts. While that number may seem like a reasonable percentage, consider Aslbridge’s finding that 54 percent of respondents said the agreement did not keep up with their changing technology needs and 36 percent reported the outsource supplier became complacent.

Of course, many of these problems might be worked out during renegotiation – except that hasn’t went so well either. Sixty-one percent reported difficulty during renegotiation. How much difficulty? Well, 47 percent “reported outright conflict, and 40 per cent cited renegotiation as a ‘fractious process,’” Supply Management reports.

The report did not specifically break out B2B IT outsourcing from other types of IT outsourcing. Still, given the high level of dissatisfaction with the practice, it’s worth considering how this practice might impact strategic procurement and supply chain functions. When an outsourcer fails to deliver on an internal-facing technology function, it’s frustrating, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to lost business.

On the other hand, when suppliers and other business partners encounter problems — such as lost invoices or failure to pay —  due to outsourced B2B capabilities, it can trigger serious consequences for the business. That’s one reason why leading supply chain organizations seldom outsource strategic procurement and operations functions.

Before outsourcing B2B integration or other IT functions, consider these questions:

1. Does this involve a critical B2B partner?
2. Is this a strategic business function?
3. Is there a compliance issue that requires keeping this in-house?
4. Is there a security issue that requires this to be kept in-house?
5. Is agility important
6. Are there service level agreements you need to carefully monitor with this function?

It can all sound complex and overwhelming. But really, when it comes down to it, analytics comes down to data: Collecting it, analyzing it and using it to make decisions.

When you strip away all the hype, there are basically three types of analytics:

1. Descriptive analytics is the most basic type of analytics, and really forms the foundation for any analytics tool. Descriptive analytics use historical data, such as your demand patterns, to understand how products flow through your supply chain, according to Mr. Michael Watson, a supply chain expert and author who works at Northwestern University.

Descriptive analytics are used to create standard and ad hoc reports. Business Intelligence (BI) and visibility systems are considered descriptive analytics tools.

Even at this basic level, you can add reap real benefits by coupling real-time monitoring tools with alerts. For instance, a B2B gateway may send an alert when an invoice is delayed because it’s awaiting approval.

Think of it this way: If analytics were a visit to the doctor, descriptive analytics would be your immediate diagnosis. It uses the data at hand — like an x-ray or a description of your symptoms — to describe what’s happening now, I.e., you have a broken leg or the flu.

2. Predictive analytics uses past data to predict trends and patterns. Watson points out that in supply chains, predictive analytics are used to forecast future demand trends or run simulations.

To continue our doctor analogy, it’s like using your cholesterol and other information to predictive that you are at risk of a heart attack or stroke.

3. Prescriptive analytics are used to optimize your supply chain, according to Watson. This is “ultimate” level of analytics, where you’re using data and models to improve all your processes, from setting inventory levels to best optimize production time, to rerouting trucks to improve fuel efficiency.

At your annual check-up, your doctor may find you’re in good health, but may still prescribe that you add a specific vitamin or weight-bearing exercises to optimize your health as you age. In the same way,  prescriptive analytics can help you move to the next level of health and productivity with your supply chain.

Often, Big Data is used in prescriptive analytics, and this kind of number crunching can require serious computing power and investment. But, when you couple it with optimization technology, you can also save “significant money,” Watson states in a recent Supply Chain Digest article.

Obviously, you can’t just jump to improving your supply chain until you understand it. Think of these three types of analytics as building blocks, with descriptive analytics forming the base for predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Thirty-six percent of respondents ranked mobile as a having an impact above social technologies, cloud and Big Data — all of which are hot technology trends in the wider enterprise IT space.

Why are B2B companies embracing mobile now? There are four factors that are changing how B2B view mobile technologies, according to a recent Supply Chain 247 article:

1. Cellular technology is advancing, which makes it easier to take advantage of the technology.
2. It costs less. Mobile is much cheaper than 10 years ago, when a cab-mounted, onboard computer went for $5,000 or more per unit. The same capabilities now come in a smaller device at a cost of $30-50 a month.
3. Real-time visibility. From manufacturing through point-of-sale, mobile devices are giving organizations new levels of supply chain visibility. “When it comes to the supply chain, visibility gains tend to be the key drivers: When one company achieves them, everyone else wants them, too,” the article points out.
4. The consumer market is pushing for more mobile access and information.

Social technology ranked as the most important trend for 22 percent of our reader, followed by cloud. Big Data tied with “other” for 13 percent of the respondents.

While we asked readers to pick one, it’s important to remember there is a relationship between these B2B technology trends. For instance, mobile applications are often use to support social collaboration. Data from social media, along with data generated by sensors and mobile technology (GPS logs, for instance) are among the main drivers for adopting Big Data technology.

Managed File Transfer (MFT) products on the other hand provide a similar functionality but are geared towards file exchanges and do not provide any document translation. Complementing a B2B Gateway infrastructure with a Managed File Transfer (MFT) infrastructure can provide significant benefits to any organization.

1. Using good ol’ FTP for file transfers is more prevalent than you think. FTP sends username and password information in the clear and anyone intercepting the packets can get hold of your FTP account in seconds. That is where MFT can help secure your file exchanges. Now B2B Gateways also provide secure file transfers, but you probably do not want to put all those file transfers on your mission critical gateway. MFT can complement B2B and secure the transfers that do not need to go through the B2B Gateway.

2. Complement MFT for large file transfers. Exchanging large files such as CAD/CAM using B2B Gateway can delay other mission critical transfers such as payments. So, maintaining a separate MFT infrastructure for such non-B2B transfers can take the load off of your B2B and provide an reliable alternative for non-B2B transaction files.

3. File transfers have become complex over the years and partners and their file transfer systems have their own quirks. MFT products are better suited to handle file transfer quirks than B2B Gateways. Moving, renaming, PGP, streaming and acceleration are some capabilities that are native to MFT products and are better suited for them.

4. Share partners between B2B and MFT infrastructure depending on nature of file transfer required. Depending on the standards and protocol requirements, you can configure a partner either on MFT or B2B infrastructure or even both. For example a partner requiring SFTP with PGP may be better suited on MFT system and another partner requiring AS2 may be more suited for exchanges via B2B Gateways. If a partner does both SFTP and AS2, they can be configured on both.

5. Last but not the least; MFT not only helps with B2B file transfers but it can also fix internal file transfers. Companies runs dozens of servers just to move files from point A to B in their IT. This provides structure to the transfers and adds accountability.

Number of file transfers companies transfer externally goes up every year and file transfer remains a big challenge today. Recently, we have launched an Managed File Transfer (MFT) product at Software AG  to complement our B2B Gateway offerings. Check out the www.softwareag.com/MFT page to learn more about it.

Just as in manufacturing, banks and financial services firms operate a supply chain of services that requires purchase orders, payments and other management details. The problem is, banks have been trying to manage all those transactions without agreeing to interoperability standards, according to a recent whitepaper, “A New Start for Supply Chain Finance.”

You won’t be surprised to learn this has created major problems, including:

• High costs for supplier on-boarding
• Proprietary formats that make it expensive and difficult to integrate with business partners and internal applications
• Know your customer costs
• An inability to compare offerings among providers because there’s no standard product definitions.

Recently, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and SWIFT announced new industry technology standards and legally binding-rules to support interoperability between banks. If you’re unfamiliar with SWIFT, it’s a cooperative standards body for the financial services industry that’s been around for 40 years and is used in more than 210 countries.

The new standard/rule combination is called the Bank Payment Obligation (BPO). Essentially, it’s a new payment method that helps secure and finance trade transactions between banks. It provides the legal assurances of a letter of credit, but in an automated and secure environment. The goal is to support global transactions involving small- and mid-sized enterprises, specifically in emerging markets such as Asia.

To do that, BP focuses on risk mitigation and pre/post-shipment financing during ordering, production, delivery and invoicing.

“The BPO is easy to use by corporate clients as it is offered as a new payment term next to existing ones (e.g., letter of credit, advanced payment, open account payment) as documented in the ICC Model International Sale Contract,” the whitepaper explains.

The anticipated benefits of the BPO settlement include the ability to:

• Switch from “just a payment” — which is unfinanced and unsecured — to moving these transactions into the trade finance space, thus growing the trade finance business remit.
• Make faster payments with less paper for exporters
• Secure and finance open trade transactions in a standardized way.
• Extend payment assurances to SMEs

To offer BPO services, banks will have to implement inter-bank Uniform Rules for BPO and support the underlying messaging standards. All of that is “facilitated by is SWIFT’s ISO 20022-compliant inter-bank messaging and transaction matching cloud application called Trade Services Utility,” according to the paper.

An added bonus: BPO integrates into the banking agreements currently in place for international payment and trade transactions.

One unfortunate side effect of this is it’s difficult to benchmark your supply chain’s financial performance against your industry peers. A new Supply Chain Index is designed to address that data gap.

Lora Cecere, founder and CEO of the research firm Supply Chain Insights, came up with the idea during research for a book on the history of supply chain management as a cross-functional process.

“When I started writing the book, I believed that supply chain process improvements had reduced costs, improved customer service, and increased inventory turns,” she writes. “Sadly, while writing the book, I found that this was not the case.”

While supply chains and technology investments did improve employee productivity, she found that supply chains in many industries were still “stuck in their ability to manage the trade-offs between growth, profitability, cycles and complexity.”

Her research showed the relationship between corporate financial performance and supply chain metrics was complex, to say the least. The Supply Chain Index evolved out of her work as a way to help corporate financial and supply chains align. Abby Mayer, who is now a research associate on the SCI team, also helped develop the Supply Chain Index, according to a recent blog post on Buyers Meeting Point.

What’s compelling about the Supply Chain Index is it is broken out into industries. She explains the index and how it works, but is seeking input into the process, as well.

“The correlation of supply chain financial ratios to corporate stock performance varies by industry. The concepts of supply chain excellence cannot be generalized,” she writes. “For each supply chain it is the management of a system, but the levers for each industry are very different.”

The index takes those different levers into account: “Each industry formula includes the metrics that are indicative of supply chain excellence for that portion of the market,” according to Buyers Meeting Point.

There are other metrics you can use internally to learn more about how the supply chain process improvement impacts the company’s financial position: Operating cash flow.That’s the cash money the company generates from operating, according to David Schneider, a supply chain consultant.

Ultimately, determining how your supply chain impacts the company’s bottom line will require automating supply chain business processes through a B2B gateway, then pulling data from your B2B systems and integrating it with your company’s financial systems. This kind of visibility into supply chain processes can also help you improve those processes. But the Supply Chain Index impresses us as a great tool for evaluating the ROI of those investments, as well as providing further benchmarking.

Originally it was based on the SIC, but ultimately it will use Morningstar sectors, the post explains. Currently, only three industries are covered by the index, but plans are to roll out 36 more over the summer. 

If you’d like to learn more, check out the Supply Chain Index blog. There’s also a webinar that covers more details of this endeavor.

While supply chain managers may know the insides and outs of what’s happening in their supply chain, that doesn’t make the information accessible to business leaders.

In fact, many business leaders are content to let B2B processes be a literal “black box.” That’s a problem for procurement and supply chain leaders, who are under growing budget pressures to cut costs while supporting revenue growth.

There are four simple reasons why it’s in everyone’s best interest to open up the B2B black box and gain visibility into these processes says Navdeep Sidhu, a B2B blogger and an expert in B2B integration:

1. Visibility increases collaboration. In the day to day rush of business, you may not notice that your supplier is sending half empty trucks twice a week to fulfill orders. But by automating orders, payments, shipping and other products, you can see these types of trends. This fosters better communication by helping you identify specific ways business partners can support you, and you can support them.
2. Visibility lowers operating costs. In the same way you can identify better ways to work with your B2B partners, you can start to see how you can improve your own operations and find areas where you can save money without sacrificing the business goals.
3. Visibility improves business processes. Once you can see what’s happening with your supply chain business processes, you can identify bottlenecks and resolve reoccurring problem.
4. Visibility increases customer service levels. Nothing is as frustrating as calling up a company and being transferred to four different departments, just because no one knows what’s happening with your order. B2B gateways can be used with dashboards and other monitoring tools to give you information about orders, invoices, payments and distribution in real-time.

That’s why you need visibility, but how do you achieve it?

Again, the trade press often talks about achieving visibility in ways that are confusing. Visibility isn’t something you just pick up at the supermarket, but it also isn’t an all-encompassing, expensive, years-long technology endeavor. Instead, visibility can achieved through incremental steps with real ROIs.

This month’s B2B.com article outlines “The Five Building Blocks of B2B Visibility.” In addition to explaining how these blocks create end-to-end visibility, the article  discusses the individual benefits of each step, as well as the technology investments you’ll need to make along the way.

In particular, Harris writes in a recent Supply Chain Digest article, retailers need to better capture and leverage the data found in purchase orders and core B2B documents and related data, such as:

• Advanced Ship Notifications (ASNs)
• Purchase orders
• Receiving documents
• Orders, such as flow-through, pick-from-stock and cross-dock
• Vendor non-compliance
• Storage and retrieval activity

The problem is that many solutions are built for distribution centers, he writes, but what retailers now need are:

• End-to-end visibility into their supply chains.
• Preservation of supply chain source data, including purchase orders, ASNs and receipts;
• Proactive identification of shipment problems;
• Rapid resolution of trouble shipments
• Support for flow through, cross-dock, pick-from-stock and future best practices

Each of these areas can provide savings, if you have the right tools to use this data, Harris writes.

What’s great about Harris’ article is he also provides a distribution optimization flow chart that shows exactly where retail supply chains can automate distribution activities, as well as the key points for setting up an alarm to let you know when there’s a problem with the business process. These kinds of alerts allow you to manage just the exceptions, rather than monitoring all of the data related to B2B business processes.

Harris seems to be advocating for a rip-and-replace approach to distribution management, but that’s not the only solution. In fact, you may already have the technology to support the underlying integration required for this level of visibility and automation.

Instead of a rip-and-replace approach, many top supply chains start with a B2B gateway that integrates with suppliers and automate purchase orders, payments and other B2B related documents. As B2B integration experts Dave Brooks and Sean Riley recently explained, that B2B integration provides the foundation for smaller projects that lead achieve end-to-end visibility, while reducing costs and errors along the way.

Dave calls these seven steps the “path to agility.”

To learn more about these steps, check out “7 Steps to Drive Business Agility with Process Visibility” or our most recent article, “Five Building Blocks of B2B Visibility.”

“The gain is related to both the size of the benefit and the consistency of achieving it,” he explains. “The pain part has to do with the ease of implementation, and the percent of projects that just don’t seem to go very well.

“In other words, we do not accept the “no pain, no gain” concept. We want low pain, lots of gain.”

Gilmore decided to bypass the usual solutions such as demand planning, warehouse management, and transportation management, focusing instead on some of the lesser-known supply chain technologies.

He looked at 10 solutions in all, giving each separate pain and gain rations of 1-5, with 5 being the maximum:

• Voice technology in distribution Pain:Gain of 1:3
• Spend management visibility 3:5
• Inventory optimization 3:5
• Labor management systems in distribution 1:3
• Network optimization tools 3:5
• E-auctions tools 2:4
• Transportation carrier bid optimization 1:3
• Sales and operations planning workbenches 1:3
• Transportation analytics 2:4
• Distributed order management 2:3

You’ll notice none hit that sweet spot of a 1 pain and five gain. Still, this is just Gilmore’s informed assessment. You should read this list and and his explanations then perhaps try your own pain to gain assessment.

One thing we at B2B.com did notice about this list: These technologies aren’t something you’ll be able to implement in a vacuum. If you pursue any of them, you’ll need the support of B2B gateways or B2B integration to take full advantage of these technologies.

We’ve discussed how B2B integration and automation can be bring visibility to spend management and help with inventory optimization. B2B gateways can also support e-auction tools by enabling electronic payment solutions beyond, say, Paypal.

B2B gateways can also assist with transportation carrier optimization by reducing the time it take to obtain bids from multiple carriers. That data can be integrated with transportation analytics systems, allowing you can measure and monitor transportation costs and on-time deliveries of specific suppliers.

Finally, Gilmore describes distributed order management as a technology that “really sits on top of regular order management — but eventually they will simply be the order management system.” As we shared in our Super Charge Your Supply Chain series, B2B gateways and integration are an essential part of automating order management — and we expect those benefits to hold true for distributed order management as well.

While revenue growth is projected to rise by 6.5 percent, the study found that procurement budgets will be reduced by .4 percent. On top of that, it’s expected staff numbers will also decline by about half a percent, reports Procurement Leader.

At the same time, chief procurement officers are being asked to make innovation a top priority with reducing procurement costs, the article states. For Chief Procurement Officers, this will mean aligning tightly with business objectives. So how can CPOs accomplish all of that?

U.S. Industrial component manufacturer Timken recently shared four objectives it’s using to support business strategy while controlling procurement costs:

1. Standarize. For Timken, that meant reducing the ERP systems it had collected during a series of mergers and acquisitions, but it’s important to access your own needs for standards. For instance, many organizations still use hand invoices and payment processes, all of which can be standardized and automated by a B2B gateway. Standardization allows you to reduce errors, but it also makes it easier to monitor key performance indicators and hold all suppliers to the service level agreements.

2. Go lean. Lean practices offer a cycle for finding and eliminating waste, so that you’re always evolving and creating more efficient business processes. Like standardization, technologies such as B2B gateways create the automation and visibility that’s critical to supporting lean initiatives.

3. Make inflation migration a priority. Though Timken uses 100 percent recycled steel, inflation is still a concern. Monitoring supplier prices, collaborating with suppliers and competitive bidding are all tools CPOs can use to combat rising costs.

4. Review contracts with an eye toward how suppliers can add value. This is where monitoring procurement KPIs (key performance indicators) can really pay off. Is a supplier often late? Are you paying on time?

You might also try this tactic given to students at recent Procurement Leaders Mini MBA program: Map out your suppliers on a matrix by two variables, price and perceived use value, to see where the supplier under review falls. This type of data can provide leverage as you renegotiate contracts.