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BravoSolution: The Globalist of Procurement Tech Providers — Year-End Tech Review

12/06/2016 By

Vincent Tang/Adobe Stock

This post is part of our 2016 Year-End Procurement Tech Review, in which we offer procurement practitioners a bird’s-eye view of some key vendors and their solutions in select categories. This week, we’re highlighting companies in the sourcing (including e-sourcing) and supplier management spaces.

BravoSolution is perhaps the most international of all procurement technology suite providers. The Chicago-based firm delivers a core source-to-pay (S2P) suite (consisting of modules that can be individually or collectively licensed) that includes spend analysis, sourcing, sourcing optimization, supplier management, savings tracking and contract lifecycle management (CLM) along with advanced category sourcing technologies targeted at the transportation, packaging, facilities and MRO categories.

Quick Facts

  • Founded: 2001
  • Headquarters in Chicago, with additional offices in Australia, Benelux, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Nordics, Pakistan, China, Spain, the United Arab Emirates and the U.K.
  • Number of employees (range): 501–1,000
  • Total annual revenue (range): $51 million–$100 million
  • Percentage of revenue from procurement/supply: 100%
  • Serves customers in North America, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australasia
  • Customers include KraftHeinz, Henkels & McCoy, C.R. Bard, AutoGrill, McDonald’s, Ferrero, Deutsche Post DHL Group, Geox, L’Oreal, Ferrari, Siemens, Dover, Walter Investments
  • Industries served include industrial manufacturing/materials, public sector, consumer packaged goods, retail, energy and utilities
  • Available modules: spend analysis, sourcing, sourcing optimization, supplier relationship management, contract lifecycle management, e-procurement, invoicing
  • BravoSolution’s native integration module (BravoSolution Integration Manager) is an open-standard web services platform compliant with a number of EAI/integration technologies, including Talend, Mulesoft, Tibco, SAP, Oracle and Dell Boomi

Background & Overview

The procurement technology and solutions market is one with a wide degree of choice for customers. Procurement organizations that want to prioritize absolute capability in specific functional areas (modules) or technology innovation (e.g., platform as a service) can have their pick of providers. Organizations that want integrated suite capabilities also have an array of choices, and those that want to prioritize usability and adoption have choices, too.

But if you want a broader combination of these capabilities in a single provider, the choices narrow significantly, especially at the suite level. At the intersection of these requirements is where BravoSolution comes in. This source-to-contract provider that historically has partnered for procure-to-pay capabilities — and will soon have its own P2P solution based on initially integrating and enhancing and ultimately re-platforming Puridiom, a recently acquired asset — excels compared with its peers.

For procurement organizations looking for more advanced, single-suite source-to-contract functional capability from a single provider that includes integrated spend/ procurement analytics with core sourcing, sourcing optimization and both basic and advanced supplier management capabilities, BravoSolution is likely to be a strong shortlist candidate to consider. Today, BravoSolution has limited suite competitors that can closely or fully check the box in these areas. Even fewer still are the competitors that can demonstrate the value of a suite approach by showing the benefits at the intersection of these areas rather than just the modules themselves, while still covering all the other ground it does.

Competitors include:

  • SAP Ariba
  • Coupa
  • Determine
  • Ivalua
  • GEP
  • SciQuest
  • Zycus

Commentary & Summary

BravoSolution made a strategic bet in recent months that focusing on developing best-in-class “upstream” procurement technology suite capability would not be sufficient to maintain and build upon its competitive position in the global market. All strategic decisions come with tradeoffs. It is our hope that BravoSolution continues to invest in innovative capabilities in the areas in which it has such a long history and in which it recently completed a complex and widescale replatforming initiative.

Fortunately, the 2017 BravoAdvantage product roadmap we have seen suggests that the upstream suite area is one where we can expect to see continued innovation. This includes industry-specific investments in manufacturing areas, such as supplier quality and design engineering integration, despite the potential distraction from also rolling out integrated procure-to-pay capabilities.

Customers and potential customers should follow BravoSolution’s early source-to-pay suite journey closely and look to Spend Matters and other sources to evaluate early versions of the Q1 2017 and Q2 2017 releases to understand how competitive these initial releases are. At this stage, we will withhold recommendations and judgement on the area until there is an integrated product available, although potential beta customers are likely to get close attention paid to their requirements and wishlist items.

For a more comprehensive analysis and guide for procurement organizations looking to understand whether they should consider adding the provider to their shortlists for consideration, please head over to the Spend Matters Almanac.

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