Crossroads 2002 A-List Award Winners

CascadeWorks, Inc.
San Francisco, CA

CascadeWorks Clarity
> Services e-Procurement

CUSTOMERS AT WORK

Fortune 500 companies rely on the talent pools of third-party services firms every day. From temporary staffing to management consulting, companies spend millions of dollars on outside professionals every year. CascadeWorks customers bring that spending under control and enhance vendor relationships. A brokerage firm, a high-tech manufacturer, and an international bank were among the reference customers. Common strategic objectives included:

§ Reducing maverick spending and related markup costs

§ Achieving savings by better leveraging volume, early payment and other negotiated discounts

§ Gaining visibility into services spending patterns

WHY CASCADEWORKS?

Procurement executives leverage CascadeWorks to coordinate a company’s total services spend. CascadeWorks Clarity’s Web-based architecture includes an enterprise integration layer, a flexible application infrastructure to control user access and interface, and configuration features to support multiple service categories. The resulting digital inter-enterprise collaboration environment allows companies to configure the solution to business unit needs while also creating a unified audit history of services spend.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Near-term value: Companies use CascadeWorks Clarity to unify spending activities and that almost immediately generates cost savings. Customers reported significant reduction in maverick spending after implementation—in some cases, a more than 50 percent decrease.

Enterprise innovation: For many CascadeWorks customers, bringing visibility and coordination to services spending is another milestone in the e-procurement journey. Although a number of organizations are using CascadeWorks in conjunction with an Ariba procurement implementation, it is important to note that Ariba is not a prerequisite. Rather, CascadeWorks customers share a vision—with thousands of contractors and consultants, these organizations stress their need to align spending with valued providers, adopt best practices, and streamline back-office processes. One customer eliminated 15,000 invoice transactions by consolidating billing information in CascadeWorks on a vendor-by-vendor basis.

Technology gains: Organizations leverage CascadeWorks to improve and extend their business processes seamlessly. Companies have integrated the software with their directory structures to provide better individual contractor history, identity tracking, and timekeeping. This allowed the IT department to automate contractor provisioning and de-provisioning activities such as security badging. CascadeWorks’ customers report that they can configure and update roles and approval workflows to fit their business needs. One large organization passes a nightly update of their organizational structure to CascadeWorks Clarity to keep approval processes up to date.

SUCCESS FACTORS

Project strategy: All CascadeWorks customers succeeded by making the business case to both procurement executives and their suppliers. The CascadeWorks solution allowed stakeholders to obtain needed resources sooner and improve the cash management position for both buyer and supplier.

Learning: Cascadeworks Clarity is reported to be an intuitive and easy-to-learn solution. The majority of customer organizations had little problems introducing their hiring managers, suppliers and contractors to the Web interface for, at a minimum, timekeeping use.

Resources: Depending on the organization, process change may be a challenge for traditionally autonomous hiring managers.

Fit: Fortune 500 organizations with a significant total services spend.

COMPANY INFO

CascadeWorks is a private company with 50 employees.

415.402.8000
www.cascadeworks.com
Published: January 2002