Lessons from Transparent Punch-out Project
One of the projects I learned the most from at Oracle was Transparent Punch-out. Of course, for as long as I can remember we had this vision of keeping content under the supplier's control & on their website but being able to ensure a consistent user experience for self-service requisitioners. For many years this just sat on the shelf, until one day Vijay Pawar and a few crack engineers on his team did an advanced prototype that actually worked and performed. We were able to do a distributed & parallel XML query to multiple content sources, get the responses, aggregate them & display them all within a second or two. We immediately submitted a patent on the idea, and scheduled it for the 1st available release.
Next, we invited a bunch of distributor suppliers to Redwood Shores to get their feedback. We told them "look, no more catalog syndication". We send you a query, you respond with the results. It's all real-time, with search governors in place to ensure speed. How do you think they reacted? "Boo!", "Hiss!", "NEVER!"
We had failed to position the "why" – and suppliers, hungry to differentiate to their customer base, just weren't buying. Sure, there were a couple ready to compete on price alone with good back-end systems who were ready to play ball. But 1 company estimated it would cost them $900,000 to adapt their systems. Pah! I'll adapt their systems for that and then hang out in the French Riviera for a few months to recoup. The bottom line was, if suppliers view a technology change as moving them closer to a commodity they will passively & actively resist.
Transparent Punchout may yet prove compelling – in fact, it has been pushed forward a lot further in the UK than in the US. Time will tell.
But lesson learned – technology that bring capabilities to buyers at the expense of sellers will go nowhere fast.
Perhaps “Product Catalog Web Service” would have done the trick with the Vendor’s IT departments.
AnonymousCoward
04/28/06 9:21 PM at 9:21 pm
What would have done it was a guarantee that the web service wouldn't be distributed – that it wouldn't search many vendors websites and display comparable items from a variety of sources with pricing information. Unfortunately, we called the feature "Distributed Search" at first which didn't help. We renamed it "Transparent Punchout" which was a lot better.
btw, it wasn't the IT departments of the vendor firms that were the problem. It was the Sales leadership responsible for customer relations. IT, as I think makes sense, does whatever the business needs. So even though calling a web service would have upped the coolness factor, it wasn't an IT-driven decision on whether or not to support."
Dave Stephens
04/28/06 9:29 PM at 9:29 pm
Hello Dave,
I’m working a lot with static content and its costs a lot of time and energy.
I’ve been reading around on the Transparent punchout and found it THE solution I was looking for (as a supplier).
I’d be interested in knowing upto where have things gone to know and what’s your view on it ?
Thanks
rcolas
06/11/09 8:34 AM at 8:34 am
I remain a big fan. At Coupa, we came up with a radically different approach that we’ll be announcing on Monday. We’ll see whether folks like it!
Dave Stephens
06/11/09 8:55 AM at 8:55 am
Hi Dave,
I’m interested in hearing about your new approach for this requirement at Coupa and the adoption rate of Oracle’s Transparent Punchout with suppliers.
Best regards,
David
wittyfull
02/14/10 12:16 PM at 12:16 pm
David, I’ve moved on from Coupa & am back at Oracle working on integrating Sun Systems. Coupa really moved the needle in this area & continues to be very innovative. A good followup contact point is noah at coupa dot com.
Dave Stephens
02/25/10 5:22 PM at 5:22 pm