Boston April 30, 2001 Open Ratings, a provider of software for rating suppliers, announced today the release of Buyer Insight Enterprise v1.0, a predictive supplier performance management application targeted at Global 3000 companies.
The application helps buyers select, evaluate and monitor suppliers, making use of Open Ratings' predictive performance ratings on 15 million suppliers in North America. The software extrapolates decisions based on historical performance to forecast future supplier performance.
"The fast-paced relationships between trading partners that have accompanied the rise of e-procurement have put buyers under more pressure than ever to select and monitor suppliers efficiently and effectively," said Joe Yacura, former senior vice president of global procurement for American Express. Yacura added that Open Rating's application can give buyers the ability to evaluate in real-time how a supplier is likely to perform in the future in terms of product quality, timeliness and responsiveness to queries.
Open Ratings develops its ratings by identifying patterns that project future supplier performance in information from numerous sources, including quantitative transaction and contract compliance data; qualitative buyer feedback; and third-party sources of operating and financial information.
"A key lever for minimizing total costs of ownership and shortening product or service development cycles is to prevent poor performance upstream in the supply chain," said Tim Minahan, managing director for e-business at technology consultancy The Aberdeen Group. Standardized performance metrics can enable companies to identify areas for supply chain improvement that can directly impact the bottom line and increase competitive advantage, Minahan added.
"Supplier performance management of high-impact, non-core spend represents a largely untapped opportunity for companies to impact the bottom line," said Stan Smith, Open Ratings' CEO, president and co-founder.
