Q2 2023 Insider roundup: A deep dive into procurement tech market movements; updated coverage of 10 vendors

Throughout the year our analyst team provides vendor-specific profiles and tech solution analyses as part of Spend Matters Insider content. Our coverage also explores the latest thought leadership topics about procurement and supply, the technology that serves it and comparative analyses based on demos and the scoring of 500+ RFI requirements across 12 source-to-pay (S2P) categories that create our Vendor Ranking data. In this roundup of Q2, we review the Vendor Analyses and other Insider content that the team produced in the previous quarter. We then look ahead to what members can expect in the coming months.

Exploring the world of procurement tech in Q2

Spend Matters Insider coverage in Q2 included more than just our staple Vendor Analyses. Our team keeps tabs on the latest news in the procurement world and explores ideas that will inform that world’s future. A collection of these quick takes, conference insights and solution comparisons is below.

From Spend to Supply — Coupa’s direct spend management progress — In May, Pierre Mitchell, Spend Matters managing director and chief research officer, Bertrand Maltaverne, Spend Matters lead analyst for upstream procurement, and Xavier Olivera, Spend Matters lead analyst for downstream procurement, witnessed Coupa announce the introduction of new products to address industry gaps in spend management. So, they took the opportunity to reflect on how Coupa historically dealt with direct spend management, what the first releases of these newly announced products mean for its capabilities, and what watchers should expect to come next.

What is a blockchain? Use cases and common pitfalls — In April, the Spend Matters analyst team published a four-part series on blockchain technology in procurement. It covered the basics of how blockchain works, the ways procurement currently uses it, the ways procurement could theoretically use it in the future and the challenges companies may face in implementing blockchain technology for the first time or in a new way and how those challenges may be mitigated.

Expense Management series — In June, Spend Matters introduced an Expense Management solutions module for TechMatch, and Spend Matters analyst Meena Ibrahim wrote a two-part series to highlight the module’s first participating vendors and the current state of the Expense Management solutions market.

Obligation management: Why it’s important and what CLM end users can expect from their solutions — Although obligation management is crucial in contract lifecycle management (CLM), few CLM solutions specialize in this area. Moreover, the criteria for what it takes to excel at obligation management is poorly understood. So, Nikhil Gaur and Pierre Mitchell have set out to define obligations and by sharing a sample of the Spend Matters SolutionMap requirements, demonstrate what a solution must have in order to compete in the market.

Carbon Management in TechMatch: Spring 2023 Update — In June , Spend Matters analyst Bertrand Maltaverne both explored the current state of the carbon management landscape as it pertains to procurement and examined the strengths and weaknesses of the Carbon Management module’s new entrants.

Intake management market overview — As procurement and other functions have sought to create more value by aligning better with internal stakeholders and users, the role of ‘intake’ has become increasingly popular. So, in July, our Spend Matters analysts wrote a two-part series covering what intake means in procurement and performed a market overview to see how various solutions have attempted to address this pain point.

Vendor in focus in Q2

In Q2, Spend Matters published 10 Vendor Analyses as part of our Insider coverage. As detailed below, the analysts’ work in Q2 took a special interest in solution providers that tackle issues of Intelligence and Risk Management.

P2P

mdf commerce is an experienced public sector sourcing and e-procurement solution provider that has developed public sector expertise and best practices for configurability in the public sector, making it stand out from the competition in any public sector shortlist.

Jaggaer’s P2P suite can tackle most if not all types of use cases regardless of industry or market with its most notable strengths being robust e-procurement capabilities, strong SIM capabilities and a robust, highly customizable native workflow and business rules engine that can be used across the whole Jaggaer ONE Suite.

Risk management

ProcessUnity manages third-party risk by creating supplier profiles and aggregating data with a customizable RFI and through partnerships with third-party data providers. The result is a tracking of supplier risk that covers many risk elements, including cybersecurity, ESG factors and financials.

Prevalent‘s third-party risk management (TPRM) solution allows users to continuously monitor third-party vendors for security, privacy, compliance and supply-chain-related risks in this rapidly growing segment of broader risk management.

Intelligence and analytics

Xelix serves as an AP Control center by creating an intelligence layer that can automate internal AP audits, address pain points often overlooked by more typical AP solutions, such as overpayments, and derive PO-based insights and insights concerned with potential risk.

Craft provides supplier intelligence by pulling data from over 70 partners and aggregating over 450 data points to assemble in-depth supplier profiles that consider ESG and cybersecurity risks as well as purely financial ones.

While Ignite Procurement specializes in spend and supplier analytics, its supplemental offerings (especially its carbon accounting module) make the solution competitive in additional spaces — here’s how.

SxM

Bedrock’s Cornerstone, an SxM solution, onboards suppliers, cleanses their data and monitors them for real-time risk to synergize with is AP-focused offering Keystone. Even as a standalone solution, Cornerstone, which receives the bulk of the attention from this two-part analysis, embeds checks and controls into the onboarding process in a transparent manner, thus ensuring that the information is vetted at the time of a supplier’s entry.

S2P

ebidtopay presents budget-constrained users with a more moderately priced S2P solution that comes out well against mid-market competitors and some larger ones due to its strong direct materials management and catalog management capabilities.

CLM

Malbek quickly rose to become a Spend Matters Future 5 in 2021 and has since expanded its deep but easy-to-use CLM solution to improve its AI capabilities and P2P support while retaining its integration framework, Malbek Konnect, as a differentiator.

Coming up in Q3

Looking beyond Q2 into Q3, Insider members can expect the steady stream of Vendor Analyses to continue. In addition to that, two topics will receive special attention from our analysts:

• First, Spend Matters is releasing analysis on generative AI, with a particular focus on advancements in the CLM market. The research will provide background on the concept of generative AI, its strengths and weaknesses, as well as an overview of the generative AI capabilities that are already present in CLM solutions and potential next steps.
• Second, Spend Matters Lead Analyst Bertrand Maltaverne has dubbed the collaboration between human actors and automated processes ‘autogmentation.’ The series will examine the impact of technology on such augmentation in the procurement landscape.

Stay tuned!