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LevaData: Vendor Analysis, 2020 update (Part 1) — Direct Materials Solution Overview, Strengths/Weaknesses, Tech Selection Tips

12/21/2020 By and

When Spend Matters covered LevaData three years ago, we noted that outside of core ERP and supply chain planning systems, the technology market for direct materials procurement and sourcing was almost too nascent to even be considered fragmented. And, we're sorry to say that not much has changed. The existing players are more mature, but start-ups are few and far between, and pretty much any player of note in 2020 existed in 2017.

Direct solutions tend to fall into the following categories:

  • Suites that have acquired direct sourcing and/or procurement capabilities (like Ivalua, that acquired DirectWorks, and Jaggaer, that acquired Pool4Tool)
  • Specialized niche players like Allocation (that have been doing custom sourcing and SIM for 20 years) and Procurence (that have extremely specialized supplier management capabilities)
  • New players like Xeeva and LevaData that are trying to bring "cognitive" capabilities to direct procurement, making use of big data to provide deeper insights than their peers

When we first covered LevaData in 2017, we noted it was an emerging technology provider that had capability spanning direct material procurement and cost analytics, bill of materials level spend visibility, market/commodity intelligence, and sourcing. We also noted it was one of the first entrants into the "cognitive" sourcing space that offered a platform that leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) capability to make both part- and component-level sourcing recommendations, especially in the electronics industry where LevaData has the majority of its customers (and products in its database).

Since then, it has become more established and added deeper capability in sourcing, analytics, and prescriptive cost management and reduction. LevaData also has significantly increased the (community) intelligence it offers in the electronics supply chain, and it refactored its solution into three primary offerings: Cost Optimizer, New Product Accelerator and Supply Risk Navigator.

In this new two-part series, we will cover each of these modules as well as provide an overview of the common core capabilities these modules are based on.

But first, let's give a brief introduction to LevaData for new readers.

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