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For years, Entergy?s Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, MA had been purchasing a particular type of valve from the same supplier. What the station?s procurement specialists didn?t know, until they began using PECOS Internet Procurement Manager from Elcom.com, was that this supplier also carried many other items that they ordered regularly from a host of other suppliers. It was an important discovery.
?By expanding our relationship with that supplier, we?re going to eliminate probably 15 or 16 suppliers,? says Pilgrims purchasing manager, Don DeCristofaro. ?There is always value in consolidating your procurement, but it is particularly beneficial if you are working in a safety-related or nuclear environment. Each supplier we use has to be prequalified and then audited on a regular basis, and we carefully monitor the cost per supplier. So, by turning over all that business to one supplier, we were able to substantially reduce a very tangible cost.?
Entergy?s Pilgrim Station has been using Elcom.com?s remotely hosted automated e-procurement product since the end of November 1999 (Elcom.com is Elcom International, Inc?s e-business and technology subsidiary for hosted e-procurement) Before that, the station had worked with an earlier version of the company?s PECOS procurement software, installed on a server at the site, through a supply chain management contractor. According to DeCrisofaro, moving up to this version has brought a major improvement in purchasing efficiency. ?When Elcom made the jump from a locally installed system to a remotely hosted system,? he says, ?they opened up a world of new possibilities.?
Elcom.com, which focuses on service-oriented industries such as technology, financial services, utilities, and broadcasting and media, continues to offer an enterprise version of its product, which customers can install behind their own firewall.. However, the company?s forward emphasis is clearly the evolving possibilities of remote hosting over the Internet.
Offering remotely hosted, end-to-end e-procurement is only a first step toward even more dynamic kinds of cross-company interchange, according to Greg King, Elcom.com?s vice president of strategic marketing. Right now, what Elcom.com is offering is what its customers need: an environment that allows them to get all the benefits of e-procurement without the burdens of investment in IT resources and ongoing management responsibilitiy. ?We?re really trying to bring e-procurement downstream. I call it ?e-procurement for enterprises of all sizes.?
Small and midsize companies often can?t cope with the work involved in catalog creation and management and don?t want to try. They also don?t want the substantial upfront expense of creating the infrastructure necessary for e-procurement. ?We remove all the barriers to entry,? says King. ?We provide not only the application platform, but also the infrastructure for high-volume content management and transaction processing. All the customer has to focus on is procurement.?
Elcom?s browser-based system supports self-service catalog purchasing for MRO-type items with automatic approval routing of requisitions. It also supports more strategic sourcing. Requests for non-catalog items are automatically routed to purchasing, where they are sourced. After that, these requisitions go back into the normal approval cycle released to the supplier. ?We offer a very robust and highly configurable administration system,? says King. ?We think that?s one of the things that distinguishes our system from others in the marketplace.?
Another key value of Elcom.com?s PECOS Internet Procurement Manager, according to DeCrisofaro, is it information capture and reporting capabilities. ?We wanted to know what we were buying from whom and when. Now we?re able to get those reports and see where the money?s going. We also have a much better idea of which suppliers we should talk to about discounts.? |
