Robobai: Vendor Analysis (Part 2) — Product deep dive, SWOT, Robobai competitors, analyst summary

Spend Matters’ two-part PRO Vendor Analysis will shed light on Robobai’s capabilities and competitors. Part 2 will provide a deep dive on solution features, a company SWOT and an analyst summary.

It’s not easy to KYS, or know your supplier. It’s more than a conversation, a historical transaction analysis, a few questionnaires or D&B financial risk assessment. Large organizations produce lots (and lots) of goods and services, employ thousands of people, operate in dozens or hundreds of locations. When you get down and dirty into the corner of the warehouses and basement offices that power that organization, that business doesn’t always deliver the same level of performance, security or legality you might expect from your one interaction between a buyer and a seller buying local consulting services from the consultants down the street.

In order to truly know your supplier, you need a broad internal view — from transactions, contracts, quality and service KPIs. You also need employee feedback on the relationship and a broad external view — from third-party risk assessors across the spectrum, detailed (and vetted) questionnaires, advanced risk and performance models, and supply chain insights (since you can have a squeaky clean supplier using a tier 2 supplier that is doing some shady activities in Asia and Africa (and paying off government officials to look the other way while it forces labor in unsafe factories).

That’s why it’s good to see a provider try to take an integrated view of the problem and build an analytics-powered platform that consolidates the internal view — supplier information, performance, contracts and transactions — with the external view — surveys, third-party risk and intelligence feeds — and expertly built models to help an organization get a fuller view of what’s going on, and what should result in development efforts or investigations.

Part 1 covered Robobai’s solution overview, strengths/weaknesses, tech selection tips.

Let’s dive deeper into Robobai’s competitors and capabilities that the Australian firm has down-under to serve Australasia and North America.