After using Felix on our latest project and watching the interview with Mike Davis. I thought I would share my thoughts with the Strawman community. 

Mike’s background in the industry and plant miner demonstrates his understanding of the friction points with procurement processes and the issues that procurement and purchasing teams face repeatedly.

So is Felix the system I’ve been dreaming up every time I go back to writing scopes of work? Deep down it wants to be. On the surface beneath it’s terrible landing page, it ticks a lot of the boxes but dig a bit deeper and I feel they still have some work to do to be a solution that will be welcomed with arms wide open by contractors industry wide. Some examples below:

A key selling point Mike mentioned was the ability to pre qualify subcontractors to your company. Excellent check. 

However in practice due to the vendor user management being extremely clunky meaning that typically I have experienced issues with ~ 50% of vendors either onboarding to register for our company or having the company registered but issues sending RFQs to the vendor because of the the contacts assigned to the company.

Creating RFQs manages the documentation well and integration with ineight for wider project doc control is great. The biggest issue is the platform is based around its plant hire roots so when an RFQ needs to be assigned to a service to determine which vendors are appropriate most of the options are not suitable outside of civil works or onsite trades. This means that a lot of the automatically selected vendors are not appropriate for the package and negates the selling point of vendor discovery / database and you find yourself still reaching for the little black book of contacts.

There are also plenty of small bugs that cause enough headaches that make it to hard to sell the benefits of a platform vs business as usual for many members of the team.

Most of these issues come from the basis of not customising the platform to suit the clients needs as Mike was saying is their current approach. How successful Felix is in the wider market is dependent on how flexible the management team are in this area.

On some of the metrics, I’d like to know if the reported vendor count is based on unique ABN. When I have been trying to register new vendors I have encountered some that are already on the system multiple times (sometimes over 5 times).

I don’t see the transition to vendors paying a subscription to use the platform coming easily. The fee although only small in comparison to an awarded contract will be a barrier for many of the smaller suppliers and operators. There is still a long way to go before business as usual won’t be a barrier in this area.

Anyway that’s a few thoughts down. Happy to try provide any specific feedback if anyone wanted it.