EquaSiis Workbench Streamlines the Sourcing Process and Creates a Valuable Link Between Sourcing and Governance
EquaTerra announces the market availability of a unique sourcing platform, EquaSiis Workbench, that has been piloted for the past year at selective clients. EquaSiis Workbench, offered exclusively through EquaTerra, is a sourcing tool developed by EquaSiis, a software company owned by EquaTerra, that provides sourcing software and services. EquaSiis Workbench improves the sourcing process and provides a foundation for effective sourcing governance delivered through a companion product, EquaSiis Enterprise. This first-of-its-kind application provides sourcing buyers a contiguous toolset to source and manage outsourcing transactions. Specifically, EquaSiis Workbench helps buyers collaboratively source new services while EquaSiis Enterprise streamlines the transition and ongoing outsourcing governance. Together EquaSiis Workbench and EquaSiis Enterprise improve the process across the lifecycle of business process or information technology (IT) outsourcing relationships.
EquaSiis Workbench can manage outsourcing deals of every size and geographical scope and for any number of team resources and service providers. EquaSiis Workbench creates a secure and multi-functional collaborative environment for use by buyer procurement groups and sourcing teams as well as the service providers’ bidding on a deal. EquaSiis Workbench supports services sourcing efforts via seven core functions:
- Role-Based Security: Controls access to documents and functional areas based on assigned roles and authorization levels.
- Collaboration and Workflow: Comes standard with “Web 2.0” features such as discussion boards and chat, integration into existing email and calendaring systems and integrated workflow.
- Document Management: Provides full document management capabilities with a common repository, version control and role-based access to documents.
- Project Planning: Comes with standard project planning tools that allow tasks, milestones and deadlines for easy tracking and forwarding to the appropriate team member for action.
- Methodology Support: It is populated with templates and best practice guidelines and can accommodate any third-party methodology required. It also provides discussion boards for sharing internal best practices with other groups.
- Service Provider Area: Enables controlled access for candidate service providers to facilitate the exchange of RFP and proposal submissions, track key project dates and support Q&A.
- Issue Resolution: Offers a full range of issue resolution features including origination, assignment, version control, status and reporting, full text search, escalation and a full repository of all issues encountered during the sourcing effort.
“Sourcing processes for outsourcing deals are inherently time consuming, manual and labor intensive efforts,” said Bill Weathersby, President of EquaSiis. “They generate huge volumes of paper from proposals, baseline efforts, SOWs, RFIs, RFPs and contracts, all of which go through many iterations in buyer, advisor and provider organizations. EquaSiis Workbench is the first platform in the market to intelligently automate and accelerate the sourcing effort for major outsourcing deals.”
Rick Bertheaud, EquaTerra Managing Director, has utilized EquaSiis Workbench at a client team for the past few months. “Client team members have been impressed with EquaSiis Workbench. They find real value in a collaboration and Q&A tool that all sourcing participants - the client, third party advisors and law firms, and service providers - can simultaneously and securely use together. It's been a real timesaver for transferring large documents while efficiently managing version control.”
EquaTerra clients involved in an outsourcing transaction are able to rapidly provision EquaSiis Workbench, often in less than 48 hours. Importantly, all information gathered in the sourcing process in EquaSiis Workbench flows seamlessly into EquaSiis Enterprise, preparing the buyer to better manage the transition effort and launch outsourcing governance operations.
“Buyers have long used many fragmented desktop tools, like spreadsheets and e-mail, to support outsourcing efforts, and not leveraging this effort to create a governance platform,” said Mike Beals, Vice President of EquaSiis Software. “Buyers now have the opportunity to ensure continuity between sourcing, transition and ongoing outsourcing governance efforts in one enterprise-wide platform via EquaSiis Workbench and EquaSiis Enterprise.”
The intelligence behind EquaSiis Workbench is drawn from years of EquaTerra’s outsourcing advisory experience. Clients benefit from the Microsoft toolset that underlies both the EquaSiis Workbench and EquaSiis Enterprise platforms. Through this toolset EquaSiis Workbench leverages industry-leading products like SharePoint, Enterprise Search, SQL and Biztalk Servers and seamless integration into all Microsoft Office applications.
Microsoft US Alliance Director Kent Burkhardsmeier added, “EquaSiis Workbench is an innovative combination of EquaTerra’s intellectual property and Microsoft technology that enables sourcing teams to streamline complex business problems through increased collaboration, workflow automation and business insights.”
Visit the EquaSiis Website to learn more on the capabilities of EquaSiis Workbench and EquaSiis Enterprise, request a demo and to calculate the potential savings these tools deliver to the sourcing process.
About EquaTerra
EquaTerra sourcing advisors help clients achieve sustainable value in their IT and business processes. Our advisors average more than 20 years of industry experience and have supported more than 2,000 transformation and outsourcing projects across more than 60 countries. Supporting clients throughout the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, we have deep functional knowledge in Finance and Accounting, HR, IT, Procurement and other critical business processes. EquaTerra helps clients achieve significant cost savings and process improvement with internal transformation, shared services and outsourcing solutions. For more information, please contact Lee Ann Moore at +1 713.669.9292; www.equaterra.com.
About EquaSiis
EquaSiis provides software and services that improve the business support services lifecycle for shared services, outsourcing practitioners and service providers. The software, EquaSiis Workbench and EquaSiis Enterprise, is a framework for collaboration used during the service delivery assessment and sourcing process to assist in analysis and decision making for shared services or outsourcing. EquaSiis provides intelligence and optimization for the delivery of business support services across the entire organization. The company also offers service providers market intelligence, research, customer satisfaction and trending data through its Insights group. To learn more about EquaSiis Workbench and Enterprise, contact Mike Beals +1 678.459.2536; mike.beals@equasiis.com or www.equasiis.com.
Contacts:
EquaSiis
Ron Walker, EquaSiis, +1 858-486-6035
ron.walker@equasiis.com
