What a Year!

Welcome to Decideware’s newsletter, DShare, February 2010 edition.

On review, 2009 was a very enjoyable and successful year for Decideware as we grew the business providing clients with marketing procurement tools and program administration services.

Among the highlights, were:

• Growing the supplier evaluation business with more Fortune 500 clients—a sign that we’re offering something of value to the market
• Working with clients to develop new agency management tools, including a module for managing Scope of Work & Agency Compensation
• Working with the Association of National Advertisers (the ANA) to develop a productive partnership where we help to educate their large advertiser membership about agency management tools and techniques 
• Improving our services offer—to help clients deploy Decideware software tools
• Securing our first Asian client (in Korea)—surely Asia will continue to rocket ahead with their need for supplier management technologies and services
• Engaging new staff members Liz Geiser (US Support), Jim Richter (Senior Developer, Sydney) and Kristina Jozic (Software & Support Manager, Sydney)
• Celebrating 2 years of Decideware, Inc. with continued high growth
• Decideware Director Derek Groom relocating (back) to London to open Decideware | Europe to round out our global presence

2010, so far

And we’ve been off to a very busy start to 2010, welcoming new clients in the USA, including Mars, Target and Boehringer-Ingelheim; LG Electronics in Korea and a major property development company in Australia.

Richard Benyon is about to hit the road again to conduct presentations for the Association of National Advertisers in New York and Dallas, see below.

Following the opening of Decideware | Europe in London, Derek Groom presented to ISBA’s Communications Procurement Group and is exhibiting at the Annual Conference of ISBA on March 18 where Decideware is a sponsor. He is also building awareness of Decideware’s marketing procurement tools among the membership at related industry association events including those of CIPS and the Marketing Society.

The software team in Sydney has been working hard to make significant product enhancements to Relationship Optimizer and to further refine our new Scope of Work application, see further detail below. 

Industry Presentations

2009 saw us increasing our commitment to help inform and educate members of the marketing procurement fraternity.

As part of that commitment we delivered presentations to:

• The Communications Procurement Group of COMPAG, London, October
  Derek Groom presented a session to communication services buyers to highlight our learnings working with many major advertisers of the past years. This is a topic of major interest to the Communications Procurement Group as their members seek better ways to manage the marketing spend in larger companies. Because Decideware works across many companies we are able to offer views on what works best in various situations, depending upon each client’s needs.
• The ANA’s Agency Relations Committee
  Richard Benyon co-presented a case study with client, Kate Corpus from Genentech/Roche to the ANA's Agencies Relations Committee which highlighted the marriage of agency software and an assessment framework which draws on the ANA’s best-practice agency evaluation concepts. The session was very well received generating a great deal of interest and discussion. Sharing Best Practice experience is something the ANA value because the learnings are often very applicable to their members. Kate did a wonderful presentation which was very well received by her colleagues, so much so that we have been asked to do two further case studies for ANA members, March 9th in New York and Dallas March 16th.

For more details please contact Richard Benyon, at: rbenyon@decideware.com or
415-259-8735.

Conferences

In December we attended 2 interesting conferences:

The 10th Annual ISM Services Conference, Phoenix
We exhibited at the 10th Annual ISM Services Conference in Phoenix which provided an opportunity to talk with category managers with responsibilities for marketing procurement.

We saw a great deal of interest from category managers across many sectors who sometimes struggle to address the almost unique needs of the marketing procurement discipline.

It was also a great opportunity to hear from Mike Thyen, CMO at Eli Lilly speaking about how they manage their marketing spend and Scope of Work processes.

Software Vendors SaaS Migration Conference, San Jose
We also attended the Software Vendors SaaS Migration Conference in San Jose, which focused on Winning Cloud Strategies. The conference explored the growth on the Software-as-a-Service delivery model

Decideware is one of the early pioneers of the SaaS delivery method and we remain keen to stay at the forefront of SaaS technologies.

Entrepreneur of the Year Sponosorship

Decideware continued our sponsorship of Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Awards because being entrepreneurs we applaud EY’s efforts to recognize like-minded and successful business people. See www.ey.com/au/eoy

PRIME Awards Sponsorship

This was the 5th year Decideware sponsored the PRIME Awards which recognize sales & marketing excellence in the Australian pharmaceutical industry. Decideware provides a number of pharmaceutical clients with software applications and we value the opportunity to make a modest but worthwhile contribution back to the industry. See www.primeawards.com.au

Export Awards

Decideware was a finalist in the NSW Premier’s Export Awards for 2009 recognising our efforts and success in providing clients with competitive software applications in the US and UK.

Technology Update

2009 has been a year where we’ve refined our existing applications, established the agency management suite and built an exciting new application, Scope of Work Manager.

Scope of Work Manager
One of the major challenges facing the marketing procurement sector is managing agency fees to deliver great creative campaigns, cost-effectively. SoW Manager offers clients a much more dynamic and collaborative method to handle changing Scopes in a dynamic environment.

Scope of Work Manager has been designed with input from larger clients in the US who have been looking for better way to manage this important process.

Scope of Work Manager allows clients to:

• Provide online access to all the stakeholders who need to contribute
• Select the calculations technique they prefer
• Access reports which quickly communicate the important information buried within the data 
• Manage many changing Scopes simultaneously with greater efficiency  

If you have an interest in this area, please send a note to sales@decideware.com
 
The Supplier Management Suite
The development process behind the Supplier Management Suite continues as we combine a number of Decideware modules into a single application accessed by a single login and underpinned by a central database.

So this means clients can share data between modules (eg supplier profiles) to allow deeper analyses and to save labor costs with less data duplication.

Each module can, of course be accessed as in stand-alone mode or as part of the suite.

Technical Development & Enhancements
Recent changes to Relationship Optimizer and Capability Manager to enhance the functionality and user experience, include:

Relationship Optimizer

• Pop-up blockers in user browsers were causing some issues for reports to appear.
  We have applied a solution whereby reports will now appear regardless of whether pop-up blockers are enabled or not. This is supported in IE, Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari.
• As an Administrator, once a Review (Step 3—Reviews) is completed and closed, you will find a set of quick links to the key reports at the bottom of the Review page. These mirror the reports that each Owner/Approver has access to, eliminating the need to navigate to the Reports menu to access the same reports.
• We found that certain users with long emails (and with specific email readers) could have the link at the bottom of their invitation email spread across 2 lines. Thus when they clicked on the link it did not correctly populate their user name—generally their email address. We have now encrypted and shortened this URL so it will never run across 2 lines.

Capability (Roster) Manager

• In the Agency capability database module we have simplified the scale when the agency enters their data from a 5 scale to 3 simple radio-buttons.
• These points default to Primary Capability, Secondary capability or None/Developing capability.
• An “Agency Office & Contact” report has been added that lists all offices and contacts on the database. This can also be run for a specific agency and again will list all contacts and locations defined for that agency.

Upcoming enhancements

• Administrators will now be able to optionally select to manually apply Section or Question weightings at the Profile level. These options are in addition to the existing ‘trade-off ‘ method of applying importance weightings, and provide a simpler alternative for entering pre-determined weightings.
• Separation of Job Function from Profile access.  Currently, in order to define access to Profile sections, you need to use the assessor Job Function. In the near future, you will be able to define profile access on a new set of criteria, which will also allow for assessors to be tagged with multiple access criteria which is much more flexible.
• “On Watch”—a major enhancement, whereby Administrators and Owners will be able to place Agencies/Suppliers “On Watch” as a result of a poor evaluation, or for other external reasons. This would allow for greater transparency to identify agencies/suppliers who are a Risk, or consistently performing badly.

Partner Spotlight – Navigare’s NEWS™: Early Warning System

Navigare is a long term management consultancy client of Decideware, using a number of our tools to create bespoke engagement programs for their clients throughout the Asia Pacific region and increasingly on a global basis.

In partnership with Decideware, Navigare has developed NEWS™, Navigare’s Early Warning System. NEWS™ is a portfolio assessment program developed for the C-Suite.
For instance, in the marketing communications sector, it has been designed to allow an Agency CEO to:

• Gain a clear, concise and cogent assessment of the strength of Client engagements
• Gather this information: by office; locally; nationally; regionally; globally

The returns from an affordable and controlled investment are tangible benefits. NEWS™:

• Identifies client concerns before they become issues, or a critical problem
• Provides an opportunity for intervention and discovery
• Provides an opportunity and incumbency to direct action against specific performance areas
• Allows the CEO to identify their ‘star’ personnel, and direct appropriate training and mentoring to others where indicated
• Provides a platform for long-term client continuity

In 2009, Navigare’s clients ran NEWS™ programs in eight APAC markets/countries, and it will be employed in North America in early 2010. 168 separate client assessments were involved in the creative, digital and media sectors.

Thought Leadership

Don’t forget that we maintain a Decideware blog at http://blog.decideware.com
to provide a space for discussion about agency & supplier evaluation issues.