Supplier Relationship Management!
Having worked on Customer Relationship management in a service company, realized that there is no end to provide service and satisfy the customers and hence lots to work on Application end. But later joining SAP and the team of SRM, was wondering as to what is so much involved to manage a Supplier Relationship!
Having continuing to work on this product ever since I joined SAP 8 years ago, still continuing to improve the process of Supplier Relationship.
Trying to fulfill the localization requirement of SRM, China came up with the need of transparent Evaluation process during bidding in Public Sector organizations. Soon realized that when there is no automated Award recommendation itself, where is the question of transparency in the process. With further analysis from field and Market, need arise for a unique evaluation process wherein external individuals from Non Profit Organizations, Research institutes and Universities could participate in evaluating bidders and bid responses which actually will result into a nonprofit oriented, non-biased scoring and award recommendation. WOW! What a thought. But this would result into an ‘Expert’ as a new Business Partner into SRM, NOT being an organization with contact persons, but as an ‘INDIVIDUAL’.
Should we look at revamping the Business Partner model in SRM and deliver to china market alone! This is where SAP thought process comes in to look at a solution beyond, realizing that this is a generic process to other industries and countries as well if modeled accordingly.
Now complete solution “Expert Bid Evaluation” consists of “Formation of Expert Pool with internal or external users, Organizations or Individuals”, “Creation of Questions and Questionnaire libraries used for evaluation by experts”, “Formation of a committee for a particular tender from the Expert Pool”, “Managing the process of evaluation itself by sending across questionnaires to Experts, receiving the responses through scoring sheets” and finally “Award recommendation by the system using the expert team scoring information”.
Solution turned out to be such a useful process for customers during sourcing, that many other customers from other countries enrolled for implementing the same. Though the need arise only from china, now the solution is already being used in US, Australia, Middle-east, Russia and India too across industry sectors.
Regards,
Sumithra M
sumithra.m@sap.com
