Zumen Supplier Relationship Management

In an upfront conversation, Viswanathan Kuppuswami, Chief Executive Officer at Zumen spoke to Ashish Bhatia about the company’s alternative to CRM solutions.

- Ashish Bhatia

Q. How does SRM fill a specific void, and in what ways does it elevate the established CRM to new levels of effectiveness?

A. The Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) on offer compared to the established Customer Relationship Management (CRM) category presents an exciting opportunity. 99 per cent of the manufacturing industry both domestic and international manage their suppliers through spreadsheets, WhatsApp and emails for example. This is a universal approach. By the time the company puts in place Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and sets them up, there are instances of the company getting overwhelmed. Beyond what is very transactional ERP, the interactive and execution aspects of working with the suppliers are very manual and just left out.

The approach is on the lines of a material management module as part of the ERP universe. Now material management is a very detailed process with a very lengthy life cycle. This entails the product development time to the market. From ideation to design engineering to development sourcing to parts assembly and testing. From optimisation to final design up to product sourcing to give a sense of scale. It involves requests for purchases, requests for quotations including supplier quotations, negotiations, sourcing selection, purchase orders, quality checks, tracking, parts receipt, invoice processing and accounts payable. Going through this lengthy process entails communicating back and forth with the suppliers as well as internally to reinforce the decision-making. It's a highly complex process that's also very interactive, and a decision-making process unlike SAP, Oracle etc which are ERPs known as the mother ship for running the enterprises. There is still a lot of dependency outside his universe making the intermediate steps involved manual. This is where we step in.