Transcepta: A Procurement Technology “Best Kept Secret” — Year-End Tech Review

This post is part of our 2016 Year-End Procurement Tech Review series, in which we offer procurement practitioners a bird’s-eye view of some key vendors and their solutions in select categories. Today we’re highlighting a company in the e-invoicing space.

Transcepta, a closely held business, was founded over a decade ago. Throughout this time, the provider has focused on building and expanding its global supplier network capabilities to support vendor onboarding and e-invoicing efforts, including most recently in the invoice discounting and trade financing areas.

Quick Facts

• Founded in 2005
• Headquartered in Aliso Viejo, CA
• Data centers in Aliso Viejo, CA and Phoenix, AZ
• Provides services in e-invoicing, P2P, and supplier networks and platforms

Background & Overview

If you are a large, mature procurement organization that has identified a need to support and enable e-invoicing with suppliers, it’s likely that your team or your accounts payable (A/P) organization is familiar with Transcepta or its peers already. When you work for an organization in procurement or A/P that has a very large supplier base with thousands of suppliers that use a dozen or more different formats to submit invoices and other documents, typically only 60% to 80% of invoices flow through the P2P or related suite automatically. The rest have to be manually entered or converted through optical character recognition (OCR), which just adds more invoices to the exception queue for manual review.

This is where network-based e-invoice automation solutions come in — and where the best ones can easily plug into your current infrastructure (including your ERP and A/P systems). Transcepta is no exception to this rule. The provider is essentially a best-of-breed supplier network for e-invoice and related document/transactional management with a particular focus, and strength, on rapid supplier onboarding.

Competitors include:

• Ariba Supplier Network
• Tungsten
• Perfect/Hubwoo
• Capgemini/IBX
• Basware
• Coupa
• SciQuest
• Determine
• Tradeshift
• Nipendo
• Taulia
• GXS/OpenText

Commentary & Summary

Compared with other purchase-to-pay (P2P), e-invoicing and supplier network providers, Transcepta is a bit of an anomaly. Not only has it not raised significant capital to support sales and marketing expansion, it has remained focused (until recently) on supplier enablement, e-invoicing and document exchange/collaboration enablement rather than footprint expansion (e-procurement, trade financing, etc.).

Transcepta falls into our “best kept secret” category within the procurement technology landscape, specifically for e-invoicing and supplier network enablement. Yet the provider’s appeal will be relatively limited to a sub-segment of potential P2P technology buyers until Transcepta either further fleshes out its trade financing offerings or develops broader e-procurement, accounts payable automation integrated partnerships.

Regardless, we remain fans of Transcepta. At this stage, any organization considering a broader e-invoicing or supplier enablement strategy on a stand alone basis or to complement, replace or augment a broader P2P implementation should consider Transcepta. Especially in the case of Oracle and SciQuest customers (where Transcepta is already a partner), there is no reason not to consider Transcepta high on a shortlist of providers in these areas.

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.