Comparing S2P Procurement Technology Suites on a Functional Basis: Coupa, Ivalua, Jaggaer and SAP Ariba

Now more than ever, better choices exist at the top end of the market for source-to-pay technology suites.

When it comes to overall suite functional performance in the Q4 2018 SolutionMap, a handful of suite vendors tend to stand out from the overall pack, often for very different reasons. Four of the top performing S2P suite vendors in the Q4 SolutionMap* functional benchmark are Coupa, Ivalua, Jaggaer and SAP Ariba.

Within what we describe as source-to-pay procurement solutions, Spend Matters evaluates six distinctive technology areas:

• Spend and Procurement Analytics
• Sourcing (project management, RFI/RFX/RFP, auctions and optimization, etc.)
• Contract Lifecycle Management (modeling, expiration / renewal, creation / authoring, collaboration, implementation, compliance and performance)
• Supplier Management (including supplier information management (SIM), master data management (MDM, NPI/NPD, innovation, portal, collaboration risk management, etc.)
• Invoice-to-Pay (e-invoicing, supplier portal, accounts payable automation, supplier network, compliance, early payment, financing, etc.)
• E-Procurement (supplier on-boarding, shopping / requisitioning, catalog management, PO management, supplier network, compliance, etc.)

The SolutionMap benchmark highlights how all “suite” vendors have at least some functional gaps in one or more of these modular areas compared with their broad-based procurement technology peers or the often more competitive best-of-breed solution set in any one area. No one is perfect.

But how do Coupa, Ivalua, Jaggaer and SAP Ariba compare to the overall SolutionMap source-to-pay benchmark dataset?

You can find out here with these links and passages from our briefings for SolutionMap Insider subscribers:

• Jaggaer ONE: Jaggaer noted with the release of Jaggaer ONE that it is unifying three of its product lines — Jaggaer Indirect, Jaggaer Direct and Jaggaer Advantage — without moving them onto a single code base, allowing customers and prospects to select the best modules from each offering to fit an organization’s unique needs. It’s a cafeteria approach that allows clients to assemble a “synthetic” source-to-pay suite rather than wrestle with a patched-together “Frankensuite” (or “Frankensuite’s monster,” if you have to be that guy). … Overall, the results paint a comparatively promising picture for Jaggaer ONE on a functional basis, and our hats go off to the Jaggaer team for assembling such a robust set of suite building blocks — with additional enabling solutions for specific industries that extend beyond what SolutionMap even prioritizes as key ranking criteria.
• SAP Ariba: Overall, SAP Ariba performed admirably across several categories within the Q4 2018 SolutionMap and on an overall basis, with particularly strong scoring for the P2P areas and supplier management. Its long history in the space, comprehensive offering, recent enhancements and close SAP linkages make it a “must-shortlist” vendor in a range of technology selection scenarios, and its status as one of the providers “to beat” is indeed supported by its frequently above-the-benchmark functional capabilities and notable UX/UI improvements. Moreover, its targeted investments in technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning illustrate that it is not resting on its accomplishments to date.
• Ivalua: Ivalua is a source-to-pay procurement suite technology provider that, until recently, has not gotten the attention its capabilities would suggest it deserves on the global stage — only in the past few years has it started to gain the type of momentum in North America as its functional prowess would imply. Still, the provider has a longer history in Europe, where its roots and the majority of its customer base still lie. But in comparison with suite providers like Coupa and SAP Ariba, Ivalua has not captured as much of the market’s attention with respect to association with specific capabilities or investments. That’s a shame, because when ranked on a highly granular basis across the numerous functional areas that make up the Spend Matters SolutionMap benchmark, Ivalua often scores in the top tier of all providers for the majority of capabilities and, in the aggregate, among the most functionally advanced platforms across many modules.
• Coupa: Coupa is in an enviable product/functional position. It has a commitment to developing organic capability as fast as any vendor we have observed — invoice-to-pay is a case example. And it has a history of well-applied M&A strategy, so watch contingent workforce management and services procurement in 2019 as yet another area where Coupa could soon emerge as a leader following its acquisition of DCR Workforce. With all that commitment and history, Coupa is setting an aggressive product and capability pace for others to follow.

In the coming weeks, look for S2P SolutionMap comparative analyses of suite providers Determine, SynerTrade and Zycus.

* SolutionMap compares a total of 58 solution providers across more than 600 granular functional benchmarks, which are aggregated into more manageable, tiered buckets for the purpose of this analysis. (Those procurement organizations leveraging SolutionMap for a software selection process gain insight into comparative performance at a significantly more granular level of detail that maps business requirements to functional performance.) The SolutionMap analyst ratings used in this analysis are based on more than 3,000 hours of live product demonstrations and validated vendor RFI responses. Over 850 customer references in the SolutionMap database are also evaluated separately, enabling organizations to separate out customer satisfaction metrics from functional performance — the two are not always correlated!