Release 160 Highlight: BOM Lifecycle Manager and MS Word for Contract Authoring

di Vishal Patel

Ivalua’s latest Platform Release 160 further strengthens its market leading position in Source to Contract (S2C) and Source to Pay (S2P) with the introduction of several new and improved capabilities. Today, we’ll focus in on two specific areas – Direct Materials Sourcing and Contract Management.

Ivalua Releases the BOM Lifecycle Manager

Ivalua’s new BOM Lifecycle Manager was developed to support direct material sourcing activities commonly found in the automotive, medical device, aerospace, and other similar industries, although applications of the module can extend beyond direct materials (for example building out a facility such as a datacenter). With this new tool, members of the Procurement team such as Buyers, Project and Program Managers and other stakeholders can benefit from its collaborative nature and support real-time transparency. This includes the ability to manage the hierarchical (n-level) product BOM and roll up actual and target cost from assemblies, sub-assemblies and components to the end-product.

The inclusive nature of this tool supports strategic and scenario planning across functional groups as well as the execution of these strategies. For example, to use a preferred supplier for a critical part that may be a higher cost than target while aggressively pursuing lower-cost strategies on other selected components to make up the difference between the product level target and actual cost. This functionality easily bypasses spreadsheets and other tools in stakeholder transparency and collaboration as well as improving efficiency and data integrity by eliminating manual data entry. Furthermore, the BOM Lifecycle Manager enables procurement to act directly from the BOM view at any point in time to select components or assemblies and directly launch new processes such as an RFx to re-source components that require attention because of a critical quality problem.

Ivalua Releases Improved Cost Breakdown Support

With the latest release, Ivalua has improved its support for cost breakdown quotation templates in the sourcing module which enhances procurement’s ability to request various levels of detail relevant to the commodity attributes and component they are quoting. Common uses for cost breakdowns are to:

• Better understand cost drivers in a product
• Deeply compare supplier quotations
• Improve negotiation
• Use calculations to roll up key indicators (such as total raw material, total landed cost, etc.)
• Support due diligence that must be completed to ensure a supplier is capable of meeting requirements when producing the product

In detailed cost breakdowns for manufactured components it is common to see sections focused on Raw Materials, Purchased Components, Logistics, SG&A, Tooling, etc. To help make the process of constructing new cost breakdowns easier, Ivalua has introduced a new library feature that makes it easier than ever to set up a cost breakdown that is based on standard sections. Ivalua’s improved ability to support Cost Breakdowns extends to other industries and applications than just those for Direct materials. For example, a purchasing manager evaluating Human Resource software solutions can easily set up a template in Ivalua collecting qualitative and quantitative data such as license costs, service options and costs, training options and costs, and other costs that roll-up to a calculation so projected annual and lifetime investments can be easily compared between suppliers.

Ivalua Releases Improved MS Word Integration for Contract Authoring

Ivalua has introduced Microsoft Word integration as part of the Contract Management solution. This functionality provides a familiar MS Word editing experience and supports multi-document authoring, additions, deletions, and track changes.  This feature further improves Ivalua’s leadership position with analysts such as Gartner and Spend Matters, but more importantly makes the contract review, authoring, and negotiation process that much easier for your internal team (e.g. legal staff) and supplier partners.

Ivalua’s R&D teams are hard at work continuing to improve our S2C and S2P offerings. You’ll be hearing more from us soon!

For more information on new capability, please get in touch