Brian Maloney

Putting Things Into Perspective

Answers Systems — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 16:07:07 GMT

By Brian Maloney

Work took me to NYC recently. While in town we figured we’d stop by Ground Zero to see the progress. I was amazed at how far they’ve come along. I last saw it a couple years ago when it was still a huge hole taking up several blocks and you could see down in the hole that they were completing the subway underneath.

Now when you approach Ground Zero, it’s hard to see the huge hole in the middle of a busy city. It’s being filled in with new buildings and the Memorial. The place where the two buildings stood now are footprints of where 30ft waterfalls will be as a memorial. They say this will be done by September of this year. Then off a bit you see 30+ floors of the Freedom Tower already hovering over. It’s amazing to see. We listened in on a tour guide who was talking to a dozen school kids and one thing he said brought goose bumps. He said they no longer refer to this area as Ground Zero. “Ground Zero is a place of devastation. As we look out today we see a place of rebirth.” He was right. These city blocks are full of activity and it’s great to see.

So why am I writing about this in a FoodService Blog? No real reason. But if it makes you slow down for a second and remember what we do all day isn’t the most important thing to worry about, then I hope that helps. I do have to write something about FoodService though so here goes…..man there’s a lot of restaurants in NYC.

Reducing Redundancy in Contract Management-You Can Say That Again

Answers Systems — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 14:53:44 GMT

By Brian Maloney

Don’t you hate it when you have to fill out the same information several times while at the doctor's office or when you are filling out a loan application? You end up missing something or rewriting the wrong thing, and then you have to get the paperwork handed back to you. Why can’t they just let me fill it out once and all the places that need that info just automatically get it?? Now imagine if the contract management process in the Foodservice industry were like this. It’s getting there.

Over the past couple of years we’ve started seeing these “contract portal” concepts starting to pop up, and it looks like more are on the way. The three that come to mind are what USF now has in place that was built by FSEnet⁺, Sodexo has one in place that was built by ITN, and Sysco is currently putting one in place. All three of these examples are good for some of the parties and bring value to some key players. For example, USF can now ensure that pricing gets loaded properly in their system and the right company gets that pricing.

That’s good right? It is unless you are the manufacturer rep who now has to re-enter parts of their agreements in several places.

Using our three examples above, let’s take a worse case scenario and play it out. This probably won’t happen in the real world, but I think you get the picture as more and more single-company portals pop up in the industry. So here goes:

Manufacturer A sets up a new agreement with Sodexo. They give a deviated rate that will go thru Sysco, USF, and 5 other distributors. So they first enter the agreement into their own Contract Management Tool, whether it be a homegrown agreement tool or a third party tool. There the agreement goes through their own internal approval process. Once approved, the rep now needs to go enter it into:

Sodexo’s agreement tool CaRMA,
USF’s portal via FSE,
and soon the Sysco portal.

So for this one agreement, the rep now had to enter parts of the contract in 4 places….hoping they didn’t forget anything or make any mistakes along the way. “Why does my contract say $2.50/case but the portal says $5.20/case?” Now let’s move out 5 years, and you can imagine the number of portals other distributors and operators will be introducing. Ugh! There has to be a better way.

Answers Systems is trying to stay ahead of the portal craze. We totally understand why the distributors and major operators find having their own portal attractive and say more power to them. We just don’t want our clients to have additional work added onto them. We insulate them from these redundant efforts--our manufacturer clients will still only have to enter their agreement once. The ContractPro solution will take care of the rest. The ContractPro solution will make sure that

the USF portal will get what it needs,
Sysco portal stays happy,
and the Sodexo portal has all the info it needs.

As more come along, we’ll work with those new distributors and/or operators to make sure ContractPro links with their portal as well. Manufacturer reps have enough to worry about. Asking them to re-enter the same contract several times shouldn’t be one of them.

How to Address GPOs and Double Dipping

Answers Systems — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:55:16 GMT

by Brian Maloney

It’s almost impossible for manufacturers and distributors to keep track of all the locations in the foodservice industry and which Group Purchasing Organization (GPO) each location may/may not belong to today…and that’s hoping each location belongs to just one GPO when it relates to foodservice purchasing.

The issue is so mind boggling at times that whenever the topic comes up, everyone just shakes their heads, agrees that it’s a big problem, and then they move on without even trying to figure out possible solutions.

Here’s a solution . . . .the Foodservice Industry needs One Source that maintains all the GPO’s and which locations link to each one. This One Source would be independent of any distributor, manufacturer, or operator. Anyone in the industry that needs to know location-level information by GPO could go to the One Source and that’s it.

Let’s use an example: Manufacturer A wants to set up a contract with Novation and Premier. The deviated pricing will go through Distributor B. The distributor is handed these new agreements and instead of trying to figure out what locations in their system they should link to these two pricing agreements, the distributor simply pulls this information from the independent One Source of information. The GPOs know they must continue to load their location lists into this One Source. That’s it.

If there are times when a single location is showing up on more than one GPO’s location list, that location is flagged and it won’t funnel into any distributors systems for pricing until the GPOs can agree who owns that location. The One Source company would be responsible for catching these and working with the GPO’s. The way this has to work is that a major distributor or set of distributors and/or manufacturers must agree to this concept and then mandate to the GPOs that they load their location lists into this independent One Source company.

It would work. So what distributors and/or manufacturers are ready to solve this?

Hi, we’re Answers Systems and our GLN number is 1100001011810

Answers Systems — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:32:11 GMT

by Brian Maloney

Hi, I’m Brian Maloney and my Social Security number is…….well I won’t go that far but I can tell you this: Hi, we’re Answers Systems and our GLN number is 1100001011810. So there you have it. Take this number and use it wherever you like. After years of preaching standardization in the Foodservice Industry and Contract Management more specifically, we figured we better eat our own words and sign us up for a GLN. If you don’t know what a GLN is, it’s a unique number for our place of business.

Just like a GTIN is a unique number for a specific product. If everyone were to use GTIN’s and GLN’s when trading data, the Foodservice Industry would catch up to many other industries who’ve standardized their data long ago. If you’re in the industry you know the deal. Every distributor has a different number for the exact same product Manufacturer A has. So if we all used the same number, we’d eliminate errors and speed up the process. Same for GLN’s and all the locations. If we used the same numbers for locations we’d again reduce errors and speed up the process. If you want to look into it for your company, here’s the info: GS1 US Customer Service at info@gs1us.org or +1 937.435.3870, Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET.

So there you have it. You now have our number…use it. I dare you. We’ve already started working with various distributors and 3rd parties we exchange data with to start using this number. We hope you do to.

Technorati tags: data acquisition, data synchronization, GLN, GTIN

Sodexo-ITN Contract Management Initiative

Answers Systems — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:27:52 GMT

by Brian Maloney

It still amazes me every day how complicated this foodservice industry is. When people ask me what I do, they listen to my answer and say things like “wow, I never realized there was a need for that.” Once you find yourself in this industry, you never leave. It sucks you in. You find yourself sitting at a restaurant table with friends looking at the back of sugar packets just to see who the distributor is. I’ve been in “the industry” now for 16 years and every time I think I have it figured out, the industry throws you another curve ball. I think the new Sodexo-ITN initiative is just that . . . a curve ball. It’s something new to the industry, and we all have to adjust. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this new initiative, it’s just different.

If you don’t know what this new initiative is, this post is probably not for you. If you’re one of the hundreds of foodservice manufacturers dealing with Sodexo, and more specifically a National Account Manager at one of those manufacturers, then this post will give you some insight into how Answers Systems is working with ITN to ensure efficiencies for our manufacturer clients and their ContractPro® users while meeting Sodexo's business needs.

Depending on who you are, this initiative means something different to you. I work at Answers Systems. We have many foodservice manufacturer clients that have contracts with Sodexo. These clients use our ContractPro® trade promotion management solution to enter and manage their contracts. We want to eliminate as much duplication of their effort as possible when it comes to maintaining their Sodexo contract within both the ContractPro® solution and ITN CaRMA tool. So, what this means to us is that we have to build a bridge that takes the contract out of the ContractPro® solution and, with the help of ITN, automatically loads the contract into ITN’s CaRMA tool. Our goal is to save our clients time and help them preserve and/or gain efficiencies.

Answers Systems is here to help you if help is needed – you can talk to others in the same shoes you wear. You are not alone! Future posts will go into more detail on the actual initiative, what we learned along the way, and how the process is working. Hope you enjoy. Technorati tags: foodservice, trade promotion management