Posted on Fri, Jan 04, 2013 @ 10:19 AM
By Peter Parks, Vice President of Product Management
Mobile devices are changing the way business is done, and when appropriately leveraged, they can help us sharpen focus and work more efficiently. Mobility has led to significant increases in responsiveness for VMS users, optimizing productivity and reducing overall cycle times in contingent workforce management. Mobile line-of-business applications like Provade Mobile promote greater efficiency and performance, and enable workers to stay on top of time-sensitive tasks as they move throughout their workday.
The introduction of business intelligence (BI) is the next logical extension of mobility into VMS. To appropriately leverage mobile BI, it’s important to consider who your audience is and how BI can advance their objectives. I see two primary audiences for mobile BI – the transactional user and the C-suite.
When effectively deployed, BI drives intelligent decisions and boosts productivity for the transactional user. This can be a hiring manager, an MSP or a supplier. Reports or alerts for missing timesheets, a pending response deadline or the upcoming end of an assignment help you make point-in-time decisions. This data can typically be delivered in a small package, so the smartphone is a logical target. You may even be able to perform the appropriate response through the mobile VMS – a scenario where a comprehensive mobile application really delivers improvement to your process and outcome.
Our C-suite BI consumers do not need the minute-by-minute detail that transactional users demand. They’re more interested in summary data with an option to drill down into detail when necessary. Because C-Suite users are rapid adopters of tablet technology, we have targeted this format for their dashboards and detailed reports. With tools like Oracle’s BI app for iPad, we have delivered an excellent medium for the consumption of this information.
Users do not typically access all of the available reporting features in a VMS because the options are so robust. One Provade customer implemented nearly 150 reports they deemed critical, but when we went through a review of their implementation we discovered over 100 of these reports had not been run in the past 6 months. Removing those extra, unused reports enabled them to focus on the meaningful data and ultimately improved their BI experience in our desktop app. As we move more users to Mobile VMS, whether for transactions or BI, we help them attain that critical focus – the compact format demands that we deliver the essentials.
Watch our webinar to learn how to leverage Mobile VMS to maximize efficiency and productivity.
Posted on Fri, Dec 07, 2012 @ 11:11 AM
By Tom Rumberg, Vice President of Technology
Too often, a company’s sales pitches are just that… a sales pitch. Companies put together compelling stories to entice customers to purchase their wares, but often have little substance behind them. In the software space, a true gauge of the validity of a sales pitch is whether the sales rep is using their own software or subscribe to similar methodologies when they are on the other side of the table.
Here at Provade, we offer our industry’s only ERP-class VMS and BI software, delivering our products as a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering in the cloud. Our sales pitch speaks to accessibility of Oracle applications at a far lower cost of ownership through SaaS than a traditional software license model. Our product is in the cloud and is instantly usable when our customers sign on the dotted line. Our message outlines the benefits of being able to get up and running on our cloud application without infrastructure or IT teams. Inevitably during the sales cycle, I hear our reps say, “You are a financial institution (or whatever their industry might be), not a software company. Why try to be something you are not? You can leverage Provade’s applications and expertise at a fraction of the cost.”
This isn’t just a sales pitch to us. We truly believe in offering software as a service, or the cloud model. Not only do we leverage our own software for procuring a contingent workforce, we also have a host of partners that we lean on for their cloud applications or experience. We offer Single Sign-On to our application via Ping Identity Management, a cloud-based SSO provider. To avoid the large costs of rolling out MS Project or Visio to the company worldwide, we leverage cloud application providers: Gantter for projects and Lucidchart for diagramming. Our CRM and Sales teams leverage Salesforce.com. We shunned the brick and mortar aspects of our growing organization by leveraging the Alteva cloud for our telephone system. And quite possibly our most important partner is Datapipe. Their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering is second to none. We get premium service, lighting fast hardware and a quintuple-redundant network to run our Oracle systems out of their world-class data centers.
So next time you are given “the pitch,” validate it by asking if your sales rep practices what they preach.
Interested in learning more about Provade’s VMS in the cloud? Contact us to learn how our SaaS model can benefit your organization.
Posted on Wed, Jun 27, 2012 @ 09:44 AM
By Peter Parks, Vice President of Product Management
Speaking broadly, there are two types of users in a VMS.
- The transactional users: requesters, approvers, MSP, suppliers and workers
- The reporting users: different levels of management within the client
Transactional users leverage the full functionality of the VMS and often benefit from the traditional user interface that gives them access to the rich feature set.
Reporting users, those leveraging the analytics and metrics being produced by the Business Intelligence (BI) engine, have less demanding user interface requirements. The data is key, and it can usually be presented in a relatively simple format. The information being conveyed is very powerful in the insight it provides, but it usually is contained in graphs and tables.
Reporting users would greatly benefit from mobile interaction with the VMS. Reports and valuable analytical insights can be consumed on the go - completely viewable in a mobile format (provided the VMS has the capability to deliver the content in a user friendly manner).
Through Oracle's Mobile BI apps we can do just that. These apps are built to give mobile users, both phone and tablet, access to the full features of our BI offering, including:
- Dashboards
- Proactive detection and alerts
- Catalogues
- Ad-hoc query
- Actionable analytics
All with direct links into the data behind the report.
Mobile BI has been an excellent foundation for our fully mobile experience. We continue to build on this foundation with each successive release, which will eventually enable all user types to interact with our system anywhere, anytime. We already deliver the benefits of mobility to our clients' management and decision makers.
Can you imagine the value this mobile capability could bring to you and your company? It's here and there is more to come, so stay tuned.
Contact us to learn more about our exciting mobile BI capabilities and the benefits it can bring to your company.
Posted on Tue, May 22, 2012 @ 08:07 PM
By Edward Jackson, President
OK…you just knew someone was going to pick up Ariba eventually. SAP and IBM had seemed like top contenders for sometime. So, the move happened. Now what???
From our perspective, we think this makes the Oracle accounts with either an all E-Business Stack or PeopleSoft Enterprise, and either some legacy Ariba Buyer and Spend Management license products or even those that moved to Ariba On-Demand, reevaluate this decision. While Ariba is currently stand alone and I am sure there are strong statements coming from the current Ariba management team that big change is not going to occur immediately and support will be better than ever and blah blah blah…the long and short is the SAP tool stack is the way forward now if you own Ariba.
For SAP, it is hard to rationalize two entirely different technology stacks (MySAP/SRM 7.0 vs. Ariba proprietary java based applications). Ultimately, if you own Ariba software, you are now a future owner of the SAP stack if you stay with Ariba and its product roadmap and migration going forward. This would lead me to think that many a CIO/CPO/CFO sitting on an Oracle based stack are going to quite questioningly ask, not "if," but when do they make the move off Ariba to all single stack. For those on SAP with Ariba, life got better. For those on Oracle, it is "Ariba-derci" time.
Posted on Thu, Apr 05, 2012 @ 01:15 PM
By Edward Jackson, President
The rebel. The loner. The tough guy in the cool black leather jacket that ekes an attitude of not giving a sniff about anyone. Whether we admit it or not, we all have some form of admiration for the ones that stand out alone as bold and separate. However, the 'cool' factor is very fleeting as the tedium of isolation consumes day after day. In today's networked and collaborative world, stand alone is, well…lonely.
That is why we believe our concept of 'Embedded VMS' will stand out. We know our large corporate customers have substantial investments into their ERP procurement, financials and HR systems. Why should our customers not be able to have VMS embedded within their ERP stack just like all the other modules that comprise their ERP stack? We think they should!
- Embedded transactions from req to PO to payment? Check!
- Embedded BI mingled with other financial and HR BI content? Check!
- True seamless user experience with federated content all within their ERP system? Delivered.
For too long, many vendors have talked about how easily and 'seamlessly' they integrate with ERP. Beautiful power points are shown of complex integration solved with a mere box, arrow and target box. However, we know the reality is that when the slide-ware goes away and the realities of complex integration come to bear, these VMS systems get deployed as stand alone with integrations sitting in the proverbial 'parking lot'.
If you are tired of boxes and arrows or 'APIs' that require you to code to, let us show you a proof of concept of true embedded VMS within Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise delivered with Oracle OBIEE to OBIEE. Schedule a session here.
Posted on Tue, Mar 13, 2012 @ 11:57 AM
By Peter Parks, Vice President of Product Management
Our model at Provade is to build on top of world class enterprise technology (Oracle), enhancing the off-the-shelf product with usability and a deeper feature set, and delivering it in a multi-tenant SaaS solution. We take the power of Oracle and add our industry expertise to create an exceptional product. As we work to add enhancements, thousands of engineers at Oracle continue to develop the core systems on which our solution is built. In turn, we share our experiences in the field and our product enhancements with the product teams at Oracle. This is called “leveraged development”. We each benefit from the work of the other.
As new releases come from Oracle we assess them and pull in what we find most valuable. In terms of new features coming from Oracle, the last year has been the best we have seen since we started Provade. In order to avail ourselves of the new development flowing from Oracle we spent the second half of 2011 upgrading our tool set (the foundation of our application) to the latest version. This work will be complete and go live in March of this year. Once live we will be in a position to begin enabling new features like:
- Collaboration (requesters, MSP, suppliers, workers)
- Embedded IM in transactions (requisitions, candidate submittals, work orders)
- Polls and enhanced surveys
- Enhanced embedded analytics
Our developers are licking their chops as they dive into this treasure trove of new capability. I am pumped because we are able to enable these Oracle built features. Our work is to assess which features to grab and where to incorporate them. Literally, as I am writing this one of our developers, Adam, just came in and showed me a working example of Yahoo IM embedded in our sourced requisition that allows suppliers to communicate live with the MSP/PMO with questions about an open requisition! He is now going to look at enabling it on other components.
It is going to be quite a year!
Posted on Mon, Feb 13, 2012 @ 12:32 PM
By Edward Jackson, President
Larry Ellison stated that Oracle was slowing down on M&A a year ago. At the time, he made the remark of SaaS that “If you look at the leader, Salesforce.com, they don’t make very much money and they’ve been at it for almost 10 years.” Now enter Taleo acquisition yesterday which is very much a poster board SaaS company and cited in most SaaS company benchmarks. One quick reaction is this is simply a “me too” response to SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors. However, I think it a combination of both a need to respond to SAP’s bold move as well as a growing acceptance (…and acquisition) of cloud/SaaS based companies. It is a new era in the M&A tent at Oracle for sure.
For us at Provade, we see a strong opportunity to continue our all Oracle focus. Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo not only strengthens the ‘red’ stack offering, but makes it a dominant player particularly when combined with its other HCM offerings such as iRecruit (eBusiness Suite) and Talent Management (PeopleSoft). This acquisition should make Oracle THE dominant ATS and recruiting provider in the market place.
Here at Provade, we look forward to extending integrations into Taleo and supporting our Oracle based customers on such. It has long been my belief that the poor man versions of ATS/Recruiting that exist in some of the VMS tools would never be a match to Taleo. With Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo, it is hard to debate the utility of inferior functionality vis a vis the leading tool in the market with the might and backing of Oracle. We look forward to the close of the transaction this summer and the deeper ties that will bring with our Oracle product partnership and this exciting new acquisition.