Unit4 acquires Scanmarket: Three potential levers of procurement value for ERP (Part 1)

Last week, Unit4, an ERP provider, announced it was acquiring Scanmarket from Verdane, a Nordic private equity firm. Scanmarket has been on the e-sourcing scene for over 20 years. Founded in 1999, the firm was closely held until Verdane acquired 85% of it in 2019. Today, Scanmarket has offices across Europe and North America, and counts over 450 customers with the recent addition of Symfact, a contract lifecycle management vendor. The solution stack is global, enabling companies worldwide and supporting over 20 languages.

In recent years, anecdotal evidence suggests that Scanmarket has competed in sourcing by being a price leader (i.e., high value, lower cost), the ability to support a broad range of sourcing-centric project management, supplier management, e-RFX and auction requirements and its strategic sourcing services capabilities. But with the addition of buy-side and sell-side legal centric capabilities gained through Symfact, Scanmarket now has a much deeper value proposition that now  encompasses supplier management, governance, risk management and compliance (GRC), third-party risk and even IP management.

In this two-part Spend Matters PRO M&A series, we will answer the following questions:

• What does Scanmarket bring to Unit4 from a product standpoint (strengths/weaknesses, how competitive, etc.)?
• What does Symfact bring to Unit4 from a product standpoint (strengths/weaknesses, how competitive, etc.)?
• What do integration considerations for Scanmarket and Symfact look like?
• What are platform/architectural considerations between the solutions and how might this impact Unit4’s strategy (e.g., BPM, low-code, commercial modeling, etc.)?
• How might it help the ERP firm bring additional value to its over 6,000 customers? What are the three specific levers of value that it could bring?
• How might the acquisition impact the competitive dynamic of SME and middle market ERP in procurement, legal technology and supply chain considering the broader landscape including Microsoft, Oracle, Netsuite, Sage, Workday, Epicor, Infor and SAP (among others).

Read on to learn more about this deal.