Ivalua NOW Paris – Company milestones and new product developments

Last week, April 5-6, Ivalua held its annual event called Ivalua NOW. This was the EMEA event; the Americas event is scheduled for May and will take place in Washington D.C.

After two years of virtual events, Ivalua NOW 2022 took place in Paris, at Musée du Quai Branly, but it was also livestreamed for remote attendees. After le Louvre in 2019, Ivalua selected another prestigious cultural venue, the museum was designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and features the indigenous art and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.

The Ivalua NOW theme for 2022 was “stronger together” and the key messages were centered on collaboration (internal and external) and on ESG and sustainability.

Ivalua CEO David Khuat-Duy, together with other members of the executive team (Franck Lheureux, CRO, Alex Saric, CMO and Pascal Bensoussan, CPO [P is for Product]) gave the audience an update on the company and product. Customers (L’Oréal and Booking.com) were also on main stage to share their own experiences. Other sessions were organized in breakouts for the 800+ attendees and the event totaled 15+ speakers.

Khuat-Duy highlighted Ivalua’s growth, a company now with 750 employees, 1,100 certified partners (56% YoY) and a revenue of $130 million in 2021. In total, there are approximately 3,000,000 users of Ivalua (buy-side and supply-side). He also mentioned the themes on Ivalua’s roadmap and Bensoussan went into more detail.

New features announced at Ivalua NOW

Ivalua announced a vast number of new features and enhancements across modules of the unified suite. The major ones are:

• Community platform to offer users a simple tool to interact with other users efficiently on any topic of interest. The community will also be a way to gather feedback on the product, innovation themes, customer experience, etc.
• Supplier central repository enriched daily to support supplier discovery and streamlined profile/information management for suppliers with several customers using Ivalua.
• Decarbonization (and broader ESG) related capabilities across the platform to enable customers to understand where they stand (baseline), define reduction targets, collaborate with suppliers, and integrate CO2/climate change in other processes (supplier performance, risk, etc.) and incentivize decarbonization via product recommendations and basket optimizations based on CO2 and dynamic discounts and rebates to reward carbon-friendly suppliers.

(Source: Twitter.com Ivalua EMEA)

• Message center to enable discussions in a modern chat UI/UX on any object (PO, invoice, RFx, etc.) and supporting discussions between internal stakeholders and, when required, with suppliers.
• Payment and V-cards: the partnership with Transfermate was actually announced last year but Ivalua is adding capabilities for virtual cards (V-cards) to streamline P2P processes further:
  • PO & expense workflow triggered virtual card generation
  • Unique card generation
  • Automatic rules assignment e.g., amount @ expiration
  • Card transaction detection for reconciliation
• AI-related capabilities:
  • Ivalua’s CLM was profoundly revamped during the past few years, and it continues to evolve to include AI capabilities to recognize clauses (56 types) and even specific terms/obligations (10 types like renewals, payment, etc. in legal contracts.
  • Cognitive sourcing (Sourcing Opportunity Finder) is another AI-enabled capability that will be introduced this year with the purpose to help customers to identify opportunities.
  • (Tail) spend classifiers and Al-based supplier deduplication, merging, and grouping will also be available to make spend analysis smarter and increase data quality.

Ivalua NOW 2022 was clearly focused on the challenges we are currently facing and the ones ahead of us. It also highlighted that procurement and supply chain professionals can have a tremendous impact as long as they are aware of it and have the means to implement decisive actions. And, walking the talk, Ivalua has joined the UN Global Compact in 2021 and will offset the CO2 footprint of the event.

Stay tuned for more coverage from Ivalua NOW 2022, both here, on our main site news page, and on Spend Matters PRO for deeper product analysis.

Ivalua NOW Americas takes place May 2–4 in Washington D.C. Find out more here and look out for our analyst coverage during the event.