Santa Clara, Calif. March 26, 2001 e-Sourcing applications provider Webango today announced the first major upgrade to its application for supplier selection, SourceSelect 2.0, which introduces new worksheet functionality for complex business analysis, such as managing bills of materials.
The worksheet requirement capabilities in SourceSelect 2.0 are intended to allow sourcing managers to quickly capture, evaluate and analyze multiple line-item data, such as large price lists, bills of materials and freight costs. The application compiles data from multiple suppliers in a buyer-defined format for an "apples-to-apples" comparison. Like other requirements within Webango's SourceSelect application, a worksheet requirement is assigned an importance and taken into account in the overall sourcing decision. Supplier responses can be automatically scored based on buyer precedents, and worksheet requirements can be exported to or imported from a tab-delimited or spreadsheet file.
SourceSelect 2.0 introduces performance and scalability enhancements as well, increasing Webango's capability to perform sophisticated analyses and to support sizeable documents, numerous collaborators and suppliers.
Eastman Chemical Co. one of Webango's early clients is using SourceSelect to source both direct and indirect materials and has been a driving force in the requirements definition of the worksheet requirement functionality. The company intends to use the new capability in the sourcing of materials to manufacture chemicals, plastics and fibers.
Debra Reynolds, a procurement associate at Eastman, said she used to spend up to five weeks normalizing data and combining spreadsheets from various suppliers responding to an request for quote (RFQ) or request for proposal (RFP). She would receive upwards of 20 spreadsheets from each responding supplier for as many as 17,000 line items. Now the Webango worksheet requirements features allow her to perform these analyses in a fraction of the time. "They will let me do an instantaneous side-by-side evaluation and will give my data more integrity."
"Companies like Webango bring a valuable new level of strategic e-sourcing functionality to enterprises that need a deeper understanding of their suppliers offerings for negotiation and benchmarking purposes," said Bill Eisele, e-business analyst at the Hurwitz Group. "These enterprises are using strategic sourcing solutions to develop RFQs that are much more finely tuned. In the future, businesses will expect a higher level of sourcing ability as standard in their evaluation process."
