Last month, IQNavigator shipped a new release of its services eProcurement solution, IQNavigator7. Its last major release was April 2004. According to John Martin, IQNavigator SVP of strategy and technology, the solution's newly minted functionality embodies the company's efforts to enable greater levels of sophistication in services procurement.

Martin asserts that the first step in managing a category of services spend is bringing control to the procurement process: ensuring that far-flung end-users contract with the right service providers, minimizing order and invoice errors, and putting in place a standardized requisitioning process. With some low-dollar spend categories, that's all that's needed. IQNavigator's tools are designed to handle that well.

But service agreements can be strategic to a company, and when this situation occurs, controlling transactions is just the tip of the iceberg of what procurement can do to add value. IQNavigator's new release is designed to support the much more advanced procurement activities useful for strategic service purchases, such as supply base rationalization, demand forecasting, and supplier performance management.

The 7.0 functionality that intrigues me the most is the capability to create a single set of company-wide metrics for tracking a diverse base of suppliers in a specific category. This functionality includes tools to survey customer satisfaction, a central repository of performance data, and the ability to compare and rate suppliers against a category-specific corporate standard. It's centralized support of local sourcing. Wow, what a breath of fresh air.

I would not have always been so positive about a procurement system that allows for local control. In fact, I remember how excited I was in the '90s when I was given the opportunity at Nortel Networks (then Bay Networks) to put together some company-wide contracts for services. I thought I had died and went to heaven.

One of those contract opportunities was for pagers, which we used extensively across the enterprise. Right off the bat, we had difficulties identifying strong candidates for a single company-wide contract, because every company we spoke with offered uneven coverage in the U.S. The issue was significantly worse when we tried to broaden the contract scope to serve employees in other countries.

Nevertheless, we pressed on with the idea of a single, enterprise-wide pager supplier. I must have known at some level that if we didn’t at least try, we would have called into question the value of our newly minted enterprise sourcing group before it ever really got off the ground. Perhaps needless to say, the result of this particular project was . . . well . . . it was fun to try for a while!

That's why I really give kudos to IQNavigator for tackling this issue, for recognizing the value of local sourcing for some categories of spend. This solutions provider is giving procurement a wider variety of effective options to create supply chains that are flexible and appropriate for the job at hand.