SpendHQ: Vendor Analysis (Part 1) — Background & Solution Overview

“Services oriented firms should not develop stand-alone software.” This was an adage that held true throughout the early years of source-to-pay (S2P) solutions, proven out by the inability of firms like AT Kearney (eBreviate) and FreeMarkets (QuickSource, ES, etc.) to develop profitable, commercially viable software products that could stand on their own two feet against the competition without support from the parent organization. But a number of changes occurred in the past decade that created a fundamental shift in this paradigm, allowing a new line to blur between services companies and product companies in the procurement sector. And one of the best examples of this is SpendHQ, a spend analytics product that was born out its parent company, Insight Sourcing Group (ISG), as an answer to many of the challenges its consultants faced in the field.

Today, SpendHQ has evolved to a full-featured analytics platform that has the distinction of being one of the few spend analysis tools that was built by sourcing professionals for sourcing professionals and that looks at procurement data the way sourcing professionals want to see it. Whereas many spend analysis tools were either built by analytics experts by procurement novices (and required heavy kludging to make initial releases work) or by traditional sourcing/procurement process experts but analytics novices (and just didn't have the power big organizations needed), SpendHQ was built by people who knew sourcing and knew exactly what kind of analytics they needed to identify everything from surface-level to buried savings opportunities.

This Spend Matters PRO vendor profile provides a history and overview of the SpendHQ spend analysis platform, and should prove more than sufficient in helping procurement organizations decide whether it is a good shortlist candidate for their analytics needs or not. This multipart research brief comprises a company and solution overview, company-level SWOT analysis, product strengths and weaknesses, competitive alternatives, a user selection guide and insider evaluation and selection considerations.