Prewave: Vendor Analysis — Solution & Platform Overview, Vision & Roadmap, Market Analysis and Analyst Assessment

This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Analysis provides an overview of the supply intelligence provider Prewave, its solution, technology, value proposition and position in the marketplace.

The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly highlighted the danger of losing visibility of upstream supply conditions. Many critical suppliers have been threatened by severe demand reductions and internal operational challenges (including their own supply assurance and business continuity challenges). And while 2020 was a year that nearly everyone wants to forget, some organizations did see a silver lining, including those who provide solutions related to supplier/supply chain risk and compliance (including software, services, data and intelligence).

Supply risk solutions have two main risk management areas: supplier risk and physical supply chain risk (that affects supplier sites and the supply lines between nodes in the supply network). But although these are separate/overlapping, they both have a singular need for supply intelligence that integrates with the risk management workflows and analytics (e.g., supply network modeling, risk modeling, scenario planning, risk monitoring/alerting, risk mitigation and recovery planning/execution via “playbooks”).

This “outside-in” intelligence capability is about curated supply market intelligence that is explicitly mapped to a company's specific risk profile and multi-tier inbound supply chain to help identify threats to critical supply lines and improve supply chain agility and resilience. Supplier-specific intelligence is also important for monitoring critical suppliers from a broader lens of sustainability, social responsibility and industry-specific GRC issues.

Such supply intelligence can be hand-built by the buying organization, but there’s no economies of scale via network/community effects. This is why buyers are considering using third-party supply risk intelligence providers that can integrate such intelligence into those buyers’ existing supply risk and supplier management processes and applications.

One of these providers is an Austrian start-up named Prewave (and one that we’ve recently named in our 2020 “Future 5” list of procurement tech start-ups). Prewave isn’t a full supply risk management application suite, but rather, a supply chain risk intelligence provider that uses trained machine learning models to identify potential risks that are likely to be relevant to a firm’s suppliers and associated supply network.