A partner-first strategy is the future of procurement at Jaggaer

The procurement services market landscape is expanding as solution providers focus their strengths more on their technology and seek the expertise of implementation and integration partners to fulfil the services process. Implementing and rolling out technology, undertaking digital transformation initiatives, developing strategic objectives, managing change, and so on, don’t just happen; all of this requires skill, knowledge and a lot of time and resource. For this reason the many types and sizes of service provider are growing in this market, new players are entering all the time and solution providers are seeing the great advantage of forming more and more strategic alliances to leverage their knowledge.

Spend management specialist Jaggaer has long realized the value of partners as a critical success factor of its business strategy and a driver for growth. In 2018 it announced a record year for new alliances and announced that “We will continue to enter new markets, expand our ecosystem and enhance our customers’ success through our valued partners.”

This recognition has not waned and Jaggaer continues to pursue strategic partnerships for the long term, in fact the organization pledges a “partner-first” strategy from 2022, which we are keen to learn more about. We spoke with Simon Thompson, Sales Director for UK/Ireland, about what drove him to join Jaggaer and about its partner vision.

Why join Jaggaer and why now?

Thompson, having recently joined the Jaggaer team, comes from a background ranging from S2P implementations to process compliance to commercial, and has done this for various organizations all over the world. So what attracted him to Jaggaer?

“When I look at our sector,” he told us, “procurement is going through a significant shift in terms of how it is perceived. And when I see headlines stating ‘the supply chain is not failing, it’s evolving,’ as a technologist I find that fascinating because, as we know, tech isn’t the innovator, it’s the enabler. So there’s a fantastic opportunity for the right tech to deliver meaningful and impactful capabilities into the business. I joined Jaggaer because I saw in them aspirations significant enough to be disruptive in the marketplace while playing to the strengths of the current trends in procurement. That might be providing a central hub of procurement process and compliance or tapping into the future procurement landscape by accessing external data sources and creating an ecosystem to deliver robust supply chain processes. But most of all, it was because Jaggaer is run by procurement people — for procurement people.

“In my opinion, the suite is a dying breed. We are moving from the great trains that you cannot steer (you’re either on the train or off it) to something more agile and affordable, with quicker time to benefit and a dynamism that allows you to make decisions at pace. Jaggaer, while very mature, is agile and evolving itself to align with the current changes in procurement.”

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How do you make those vision changes happen?

“There are changes that need to be made to realize that vision,” he said. “Jaggaer’s direct procurement capabilities remain untapped, and it’s these solutions around direct spend that are fundamental to the future procurement landscape. We want to bring all the Jaggaer functionalities under one impactful provider. And one way to do that is through working with partners — through working together and winning together. That means doing what we do best and embrace the capabilities of others who specialize where we cannot.

“This partner approach is going to be critical to our go-to-market strategy. We believe in leveraging partners’ category-specific and industry-specific expertise to provide the change management, the implementation, the system integration, and so on, while we focus on what we are experts at: our technology.

“In what will be a global initiative, we are currently identifying partners in the UK and other regions in Europe, then plan to expand that coverage. We believe leveraging the experience and teamwork of partners on many levels it’s the only way to deliver the tech support of the future, making it more accessible and enabling us to grow and create an innovative procurement capability.”

What’s the future landscape look like for Jaggaer?

“The future procurement landscape will be made up of an ecosystem of technologies, lowering overall subscription costs and making it easier for organizations to do business with them. The large implementations and longer time to benefit will become less prevalent as people want to tap into procurement capability via plug and play and into compliance and supplier capability. This will become critical if we want to embrace our sustainability agendas and social value initiatives at pace.

“So as of 2022 you can expect to see Jaggaer become a ‘partner first’ organization. It will be a partnership approach in its truest sense, with a segmentation of responsibilities, taking away the implementation side of our professional services teams and allowing them to focus on supporting our clients and working with them to improve their futures, while our partners focus on what they do best. It means we can work at a greater scale across more implementations with the net result that we focus on our customers.

“We are fully committed to this approach; it is not new to us, it’s something we have had in progress for some time and we are already selecting both global partners and more regional partners to come into our ecosystem and deliver value together. However it’s important that we look at this partner programme holistically because we believe in a global approach that is regionalized.

“This is an inflexion point within the life of Jaggaer. It’s a focus on Jaggaer, and not the sum of its parts, so that we can grow our brand and stand out in the marketplace. And it’s something you’ll be hearing a lot more about in the New Year.”

If you are looking for procurement services providers to help you with your 2022 decisions, look no further than our Procurement Services Market Landscape Directory.