iQ supplier analysis helps you answer key questions about your supply chain

Who are your suppliers?
Suppliers are grouped and linked with drill capability, to their corresponding geography, products, buyers, and delivery locations, which will typically be listed in other areas of the interface.

Who are your buyers (optional)?
Buyers are listed based on the Purchase Orders that they are associated with, so that the products and suppliers that each buyer deals with can be examined.

What materials, products, and/or product groups are your buyers/suppliers providing?
Materials and/or products will be rolled up into related groupings so that users can look at aggregate metrics for related items and also drill down to the underlying items. Drill down to the underlying data will provide access to purchase order details, including the purchase order number.

Where are products being delivered?
This quadrant will display delivery locations (plants, warehouses, etc.) so that users can determine where the products are being delivered.

When were these goods purchased, promised, and delivered?
In addition to the information described above, users will also be able to decide what time period(s) to review, which will show when specific metrics were achieved (or missed), and how those numbers are changing. The time dimension is available at the top of the Analysis UI, or can be displayed in one of the view quadrants. Generally the most relevant settings will be period (view data for a single period) period over period (to quickly compare performance relative to a prior time) or rolling 12 period analysis, where a period can be a month, quarter, or year (or any other available period). In addition, data from different time periods can be displayed in adjacent columns to compare recent history with comparable periods in the past.

Supplier Evaluation Metrics
This will allow users to select a metric of interest out of the available measures to be displayed in the 3 quadrants listed above. Users will be able to change the metric of interest to drive different types of investigation. Users can investigate how the values of the following measures vary with the dimensions described above:

• Number of items purchased and received
• Number of PO lines received
• Number or percentage of on time (full and partial), early, and late deliveries
• Number or percentage of accepted and rejected deliveries
• Number or percentage of on or over standard cost.
• Calculated lead time

The on cost/on time/on quality measures are displayed in terms of a percentage of the total purchase order line items.

Time dimension handling
The standard solution includes adjustments for fiscal vs. calendar time (if needed), period-over-period, rolling period, and last 12 period analyses. Standard periods are years, half years, quarters, months, and days.

Additional information: If possible, other relevant dimensions and metrics will be defined and added to the Solution during the tuning phase of delivery. For instance, an additional time dimension summarizing how early or how late deliveries were in “buckets” (1-5 days, 6-10 days, etc.) can be created to help isolate and analyze the costs associated with early and late deliveries. However, not all systems or implementations support additional information.

Data Presentation

Performance vs. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
Bullet graphs or conditional cell color changes can be configured to highlight performance that either fails to meet or exceeds corporate targets. These goals can be set and modified easily in the Analysis front end so that the business users can set the appropriate goals and also adjust them as needed as performance improves.