Q2 2024 Insider roundup: A deep dive into intake management and orchestration; following procurement tech market movements; updated coverage of 16 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 Q1, 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.

Intake manage and orchestration

During the second quarter of 2024, the Spend Matters team gave special attention to ‘Intake and Orchestration Solutions‘ The major highlights are described below.

Demystifying Intake and Orchestration in Procurement: The Spend Matters analyst team hosted a live webinar that covered what these solutions do, actual applications for these solutions and how procurement may go about making the business case for them to other stakeholders.

Meet AI in Intake and Orchestration: Tying into last quarter’s theme of AI in procurement, the team surveyed how intake management and orchestration vendors currently use artificial intelligence in their solutions.

Intake for the practitioner: How intake cuts to the point: Spend Matters recently talked with Sören Petsch, head of procurement at the end-to-end e-commerce solution Rithum, about the benefits he has gained from using an intake management tool, the way he sees this technology developing and what he thinks is the business case for investing in.

Making the business case for Intake and Orchestration tools: Even though Spend Matters dedicated the last few months to bringing intake and orchestration solutions further into the public’s awareness, many practitioners remain unsure how to pitch these still novel solutions to their stakeholders. Spending these months learning about these solutions and hearing from those who make and those who use them has given us the foundations for making the case that these are essential tools in any procurement arsenal.

Exploring the world of procurement tech in Q2

Spend Matters Insider coverage in Q2 included more than just our staple Vendor Analyses and our quarterly theme. 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.

Recapping new product announcements from Docusign Momentum 2024: Spend Matters Analyst Nikhil Gaur attended the in-person session of Docusign Momentum, Docusign’s annual conference. While there, he learned about Docusign’s new logo and branding, an AI-powered intelligent agreement review platform with function-specific applications and other new products.

Coupa Inspire 2024: New product announcements centered around ‘Margin Multiplier’ theme: The Spend Matters Analyst Team attended Coupa Inspire 2024, the company’s 11th annual Inspire conference and its largest to date. During the event, CEO Leagh Turner touched on how Coupa intends to address the ever-growing complexity of business, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer Fang Chang unveiled a series of announcements.

Analyst Eye on unleashing procurement’s strategic impact and driving working capital optimization: Xavier Olivera, Spend Matters Lead Analyst for Downstream Procurement, explores how recent investments in the procurement market have indirect influences on working capital optimization, focusing on the role procurement has in this, how integrations can push this optimization and what KPIs procurement leaders can use to gauge its impact.

Vendors in focus in Q2

In Q2, Spend Matters published 16 Vendor Analyses as part of our Insider coverage.

AP Automation and Invoice-to-Pay

LSQ offers a suite of working capital management solutions, including accounts payable, financing and dynamic discounting, to streamline payment processes for both buyers and suppliers.

Fyle streamlines expense management processes using AI by connecting to customers’ existing cards, offering the instant data access and notification of real-time card integration while retaining the loyalty programs of pre-existing cards.

Basware is a long-standing veteran in the accounts payable solutions market. Since we last examined Basware in 2019, however, a number of changes and enhancements have been made, including M&As that built its enterprise scale.

CO2

Daato’s ESG compliance solution provides a modular platform to help organizations comply with various reporting frameworks and regulations by assisting with data collection, analysis and reporting.

Contract Lifecycle Management

DocJuris‘s contract markup specialist uses AI to expedite the contract review process.

Agiloft has cemented its position as a best-of-breed provider that can compete against any CLM provider on the basis of solution depth — with a comparative advantage in configurability — and updated its use of AI with a GenAI release.

Luminance offers legal-grade AI for the full spectrum of document review to enhance and expedite the entire contract lifecycle process.

Core

Relish builds apps that strategically augment enterprise solutions, specifically offering one that addresses supplier information validation and enrichment and one that streamlines invoice digitization.

Procure-to-Pay

Penny‘s P2P solution focuses mainly on the Middle East, aligning with regional priorities like a procurement strategy that revolves around PR/demand-based sourcing, to cover the procurement journey from purchase requisition to payments.

ConvergentIS compliments SAP’s P2P process by going beyond SAP’s standard offerings and delivering advanced functionalities, filling critical gaps in SAP’s capabilities and improving overall procurement performance within the SAP environment.

SourceDay it is a prominent player in the P2P space that boasts the most experience in catering to the needs of direct material industries and forming partnerships with other S2P players interested in enhancing their capabilities for direct materials collaboration.

Source-to-Pay

Corcentric offers a full S2P technology suite that can be used holistically or per-module that addresses the issues faced by SME and mid-market organizations in Europe and the US.

Source-to-Contract

GEP is a well-developed S2C software offering that differentiates itself from competitors by having its large platform all on one tech stack and developing internally to become a leader in the space.

Sourcing

ivoflow‘s direct spend management solution combines internal procurement data and external market intelligence to surface new value-delivery opportunities and allow initiative management that ensures these opportunities are actually realized.

Spend Analytics

ProcureVue‘s AI-based classification system and deep category-specific spend data insights can identify the reason behind the spending off contract, such as an item previously being bought at an individual level changing to being brought in bulk.

SxM

Matchory is a supplier discovery tool that aims to streamline the strategic sourcing process. It provides a supplier database with over 14 million suppliers and an AI AI-powered search tool to find best-fitting suppliers.

Coming up in Q3

Looking beyond Q2 and into Q3, Insider members can expect the steady stream of Vendor Analyses to continue.

In addition to the regular content, the Spend Matters analyst team will launch a Third-Party Risk Management module with accompanying articles to cover the various forms of that risk later on in the quarter.