SpendHQ: Vendor Analysis, 2021 update (Part 1) — Spend analytics solution overview, SWOT analysis, SpendHQ competitors

This three-part Spend Matters PRO Vendor Analysis updates our January 2020 series for SpendHQ based on recent developments and new capabilities to help procurement organizations decide whether SpendHQ is a good shortlist candidate for their analytics needs.

SpendHQ’s parent company, Insight Sourcing Group (ISG), was founded in 2002. ISG has its roots in delivering savings to clients on a consulting basis through strategic sourcing and related procurement transformation, category management and operational cost-reduction programs. It has always had a unique approach to driving category savings and has, for example, eschewed reverse auctions and traditional e-sourcing tools throughout its past (and this despite a strong technology prowess).

Spend analytics would prove different than e-sourcing technology, however. Yet ISG did not set out to build a standalone analytics package — it began by building an application for its internal use, in large part because third-party spend analysis tools did not meet its requirements. Yet rather quickly, the internal became the external, as more and more customers saw the reports and wanted the solution too.

Flash-forward to 2020, and SpendHQ had released a complete overhaul of the platform that offered best-of-breed, do-it-yourself reporting, opportunity insights across the entire spend base, better AI categorization with the ability for users to define overrides on supplier and transaction mapping, deep insights into select categories and a better UX.

Since then, SpendHQ has broadened its category intelligence capability to offer deep insights across 30 categories, added document management, improved its categorization and classification capability, and added a native integration to the supplier diversity solution Supplier.io.

Part 1 of this update provides an overview of SpendHQ, a company SWOT analysis and a look at SpendHQ’s competitors. Part 2 examines the solution strengths/weaknesses and offers tech selection tips. Part 3 provides a detailed overview of each module and includes an analyst summary.