RE: Annus Horribilis18 Nov 2015 12:24
Sound thinking, both.
I think TUNG's strengths are its worldwide reach, compliant in 47 jurisdictions, its secure platform and ease of use. These are all vital to all global organisations. I think this combination is unique, justifying a premium on their services that global entities are prepared to pay, but there are additional costs implied also. These are the costs of R&D to achieve compliance, platform development costs and on-boarding costs. The first two are largely paid for, but there is the variable cost of on-boarding.
We are geared up for substantial, multi-national entities. We just need to land one or two of those "elephants". To get this sp motoring.
I don't understand the bottle-neck in the on-boarding procedure. I think that the most prolific suppliers are cherry-picked, which makes obvious sense if each supplier takes the same time to process, but I don't know enough about the process to comment on the length of time it takes.
I would have assumed that there would be a bulk ETL - Extract, Transform and Load. Basically, the every Buyer holds Supplier data, but in different fields and in different formats. Think of the different layouts for addresses, for example, in different countries. So you extract names and addresses, as the Buyer holds them, then you write a small program that reformats those addresses to a standard format. I assume there is a standard format for each country. (Remember all those naff programs that insisted on "State" and "ZipCode"?). The last step is to load them into the TUNG database. I use the term "database" loosely, as I believe that there were many databases, historically, that are now being rationalised.
Of course, that is only one aspect of the Supplier data. There will also be an invoice history, which the Supplier will reference as part of setting up its relationship with the Buyer and other data, such as special settlement terms. Whatever the data, there process will be the same. Extract the Supplier data from the Buyer's database, map their data format to the Tung format, Transform the data and Load it onto the TUNG database. From then on, the process is a standard form of "handshake" between Buyer and Supplier and off we go!
This is something I have done for Management Information Systems (MIS) many times. It is a straightforward process, requiring adequate data analysis and attention to detail, but it isn't rocket surgery! It helps if the Buyer has been consistent and accurate in their database maintenance, but I would have thought that would be the case for the Seimens of this world. Having said that, I once processed a file from a prominent multi-national that had 39,000 names and addresses, but almost 10,000 of those were duplicates!
Anyway, I digress. My main points are:
Our systems are overkill for small firms, as pitched to by Barclays on a Classic FM.
The bulk of the R&D and development costs have been co
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