Making Sense of Supply Risk Management Solutions (Part 3) — A Look at 8 Supplier Management Providers

“Supplier management,” often called “supplier lifecycle management,” is an area that procurement practitioners struggle with because of its complexity (as is the intersecting area of supply risk management that we’re covering in this series). Supplier management generally breaks out into two main areas:

• Extracting value from supplier relationships. This includes supplier performance management (SPM), supplier relationship management (SRM), and supplier quality management (SQM)
• Protecting that value through supplier risk management (and ancillary supplier compliance management) that we’re drilling into in this series

Note that supplier information management (SIM) is also part of supplier management and manages the core information that supports risk and reward from above — and the information/intelligence requirements for supplier risk management are immense. For more on this definitional stuff that practitioners will find useful as well, see our PRO article here, and from a technology market/provider standpoint, we analyze these supplier management solutions in our SolutionMap vendor rankings and benchmark database.

Part 1 of this Spend Matters PRO series gave an overview of supply risk management solution market, the issues for enterprise risk and the types of solution providers available. Part 2 began our look at nearly 50 providers in this space by comparing four vendors in a key area — supply chain risk management (SCRM).

In this Part 3 of the series, we’ll examine a group of the top-performing supplier management providers, including both “suite” vendors competing in the source-to-pay (S2P) market as well as best-of-breed specialists. Both have a key role to play in the broader supply risk management market. This Spend Matters PRO analysis provides insight into this group of vendors, which we describe as supplier risk management providers. It is the third-part of our series exploring the broader supply risk landscape (which goes beyond supplier risk).

This brief provides an overview of where and how providers like Allocation Network, APEX Analytix, Coupa, HICX, Ivalua, Jaggaer, Procurence and State of Flux “fit” alongside other types of vendors targeting supply risk management. It describes specific solution capabilities they offer and provides examples of common risk use cases.

This PRO analysis also includes a capabilities ratings matrix for supplier risk management of those eight providers, based on the latest SolutionMap dataset from 2020. The vendor ratings matrix compares 10 capabilities, including supply risk, enterprise risk, risk assessments, mitigation planning and regulatory compliance.

While these eight providers are not a substitute for supply chain risk management specialists such as Resilinc, riskmethods and Resilience360 (which we rated on 18 capabilities rather than 10), they provide deeper and essential functionality from a core supplier and entity-level management perspective.

Finally, we should note that while the top-performing providers mentioned above do not represent an exhaustive list of all supplier management providers with capability to support supplier risk management, it is a strong sample as a starting point for those exploring capabilities in this area. Each has something unique to offer — and opportunities to address.

Let’s dive in!