LevaData Release Notes Version 23.04 Follow

This document describes the final scope for LevaData's 23.04 Release. It is intended as a reference for LevaData Customers.

This document is not a comprehensive list of every addition, change, or deletion in this release. No legal commitment, either expressed or implied should be construed from this document.

Customers that would like additional information on any of the items in this document can contact support@levadatasupport.zendesk.com or their Customer Success Manager.

Table of Contents: Release Highlights

1. Enhancements to Platform
   1. Navigation Menu Updates
2. Enhancements to Spend Intelligence
   1. Spend Awareness Enhancements
3. Enhancements to Raw Materials
   1. New Raw Material Trend Awareness
4. Enhancements to Vendor Score Card
   1. New Vendor Score Card Feature

1. Enhancements to Platform

a. Navigation Menu Updates

Opportunities has been renamed to Savings Opportunities in the left-hand navigation with a special color. Opportunity Awareness and Review Opportunities are both available in the nested menu elements.

Market Intelligence has been split up into the constituent features as individual menu elements, including Benchmarking, Alternate Options, Leadtime Trends, Raw Materials, and Vendor Score Card.

2. Enhancements to Spend Intelligence

a. Spend Awareness Enhancements

Supply Chain Flow

The same time period filter used in Step 1: Choose My Overview is used in the Supply Chain Flow chart.

Now, the equivalent spend values present in the initial chart can be dissected in the Supply Chain Flow chart.

Metrics and Title Revisions

1. The Previous Spend Under Management has been moved to the right and renamed "Spend Change" with time period and amount comparison functionality.
2. A new Spend Under Management has been created and shows the total sum of Spend for the periods a user has selected.
3. CM/ODM, Commodity Manager, and Manufacturer Counts have been grouped together to save space and enable room for the new Spend Under Management total.
4. Step 2 is now called "Choose View of Top Spend Change" to indicate that the table is showing change between the two time periods selected by the user.
5. Step 3 is now called "Choose Timeline Segmentation" to indicate that the chart is meant to display the view over time (history to future) regardless of any time filters selected in order to provide context across time.

View by Revisions and Defaults

1. Choose Timeline Segmentation will now use "Manufacturer" (i.e. your organization's own manufacturer names) as the default view option so you can view Spend Awareness against the Manufacturers you have in your own internal systems for comparison.
2. LevaData aggregates all naming conventions that our customers use to represent the same manufacturer and that was previously referred to as "LevaData Manufacturer" but will now be referred to as "Normalized Manufacturer" and is still an option in the view by dropdown.

Detail Table Filtering

The Detail Table will now reflect the time filter preference of the user. If the user selects "2022[Q4], 2023[Q1,Q2]" then all of those quarters will appear in the table side-by-side. If the user selects "2021,2022,2023" then all of those years will appear in the table side-by-side:

As a reminder, quarters take precedence over years, so if you have selected one or two quarters but then also selected another year, the table will display all of those values by quarter. For example, if you time filtered to "2022, 2023[Q1,Q2]" then the table would display Q2 2023, Q1 2023, and Q4-Q1 2022 from left-to-right / newest-to-oldest.

3. Enhancements to Raw Materials

a. New Raw Material Trend Awareness

Components are made of combined and processed Raw Materials which impact the final cost of the component based on the raw material cost and the ease of sourcing at any given time.

Users who monitor raw material price trends gain awareness of opportune timing for raw material sourcing in each of the following ways:

1. Extrapolating the percent change in raw material prices provides basic awareness of cost impacts on components which include those raw materials.
2. Components which have an estimated weighted percentage of raw material input can generate quality assumptions about direct cost projections.
3. These cost projections become even more accurate with a known percentage of raw material input per component.

Within the Raw Materials interface, users can review the following items:

1. Monitoring price trends of raw materials and reviewing the changes in those trends over time.
2. Review Raw Materials in groups or individually and see specific Raw Material line-item comparisons for recent price and percent changes. Clicking into one of these elements (e.g. Lithium) filters the interface.
3. The Raw Material Group table metrics display for the most recent six months and show magnitude of % change each month with color coded directional indicators.
4. Above the time series chart, there is an Average Percent Change in Raw Material Cost for the group selected for view. This summary value will update if you select different raw materials or groups.
5. Raw Material Trend Chart is meant to indicate recent quarters by exact Month and Year on the X-Axis and an Indexed % Difference Value on the Y-Axis. This chart always started with the oldest value as a baseline 100 and informs you as to the relative changes in price to that original baseline 100 amount. This will help you to identify major shifts in specific raw material costs over recent quarters.

If we (1) expand the Raw Material Trend to full-size and (2) hover over the June 2023 period, we can see that the first item in our Lithium Group is Lithium Carbonate at $52.85/kg which is a 6.7x increase over our (3) baseline 100 value of $7.85/kg in January 2020. Lithium and Lithium Carbonate prices are currently at record highs due to demand for the raw material in lithium-ion batteries used in portable electronics and electronic vehicles. This large spike is reflected in our Raw Material data.

If you want to isolate the trend interface to just a single raw material, (1) clicking the individual Raw Material (e.g. Lithium Carbonate) in the Step 1 - Choose Raw Material Group section will (2) filter the View - Raw Material Trend to just the individual Raw Material so you can see that price trend on a standalone basis.

4. Enhancements to Vendor Score Card

a. New Vendor Score Card Feature

Vendor Score Card is a revamped feature within this release so our users can address common questions about their vendors in a search-enabled dashboard. This feature will provide a single source for information on vendor spend, financial ratings, vendor locations, as well as vendor-specific opportunities and risks.

Within Vendor Score Card, the user can:

1. Distinguish between Manufacturer or Supplier and perform a search for an individual vendor.
2. View a list of vendors that are default sorted by Spend and click into them to load their score card.
   • By default, the highest spend Vendor will have their score card automatically loaded to start.
   • Other column headers can be clicked to sort, including Opportunities by descending order in currency, or Vendor name in ascending alphabetical order (depicted below)

     

3. Review the Financial Health Rating (FHR) of the vendor with a color scale underneath, and below that, the vendor company’s stock price over the last year.
   • Hover over the color scale elements to see the rating bracket of each; however, in general it is 0-100 in five segments of 20 from Red to Blue in the array listed.
   • Hover over the stock price to see the value at any point in time in the past year.

     

4. Spend and Savings Trend shows a graph with time series on the X-axis and the Y-axis is doubled by both data elements:
   • Savings % is on the left-bound Y-axis and in a light blue trend line
   • Spend amount is on the right-bound Y-axis and in a red bar graph
   • Hovering over any time entry (e.g. Jan 1 2023 in the screenshot) displays a tooltip of these values.
5. Vendor Locations shows a world map with a legend for site type, and users can:
   • Scroll the mouse wheel on the map to zoom in or zoom out or press the plus/minus buttons
   • Hover over a site location for a tooltip with specific geographic information
   • This information is useful for assessing geographic risk in your supply chain.
6. Top Opportunities and Risks shows the three highest priority parts under this vendor. The highlighted part numbers below will be used to demonstrate cross-platform features.

   

   • Top Opportunity Logic aggregates the next four quarters of opportunities for all Manufacturer Part Numbers (MPNs) with this vendor and sorts it in descending order by opportunity amount. These values can be corroborated in the Review Opportunities feature and actioned there.

     

     

   • Top Risk Logic aggregates MPNs with this vendor and sorts them by descending order via four factors including lead time length, nearest years to end of life (YTEOL), single source risk, and total spend. These parts can be reviewed in other areas of the platform like Leadtime Trends (View by MPN Search) and Risk (Scope Filter to MPN) for more detailed and actionable information on risks.