Scout RFP
123 Mission Street | San Francisco, California | 94105 United States
Provides solutions and/or services in the following categories:
Scout is a collaborative, cloud-based sourcing suite that helps companies operate more strategically, more collaboratively, and make more informed purchasing decisions, faster. Sourcing use Scout to make a bigger impact on their business, financially and strategically. Innovative teams across industries, including Adobe, Biogen, easyJet, Owens Corning, and PayPal trust Scout’s platform to identify savings opportunities, track complex events, and collaborate with business stakeholders and strategic suppliers alike. Managing over $14 billion of spend through its platform, over 80,000 active users in 89 countries choose Scout’s simple, effective interface to elevate the role of sourcing within the organization. Headquartered in San Francisco, Scout is backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), GV, and Menlo Ventures.
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Scout RFP: The E-Sourcing Upstart Focused on User Experience — Year-End Tech Review
This post is part of our 2016 Year-End Procurement Tech Review, in which we offer procurement practitioners a bird’s-eye view of some key vendors and their solutions in select categories. This week, we’re highlighting companies in the sourcing (including e-sourcing) and supplier management spaces. The founders of Scout RFP launched their firm with the goal of making e-sourcing solutions accessible and less cumbersome. Since the launch of a basic but simple-to-use RFP solution in 2013, the Scout RFP team has quickly built out the core of an e-sourcing suite, adding e-auction, savings tracking and supplier (information) management. Flash-forward only three years, and Scout RFP today positions its solid mid-market solution against the leading best-of-breed vendors in this segment of the market, with capabilities even larger firms may want to use.Quick Facts
- Founded: 2013
- Headquartered in San Francisco, with additional offices in Austin, Texas, and Cleveland
- Number of employees (range): 26–50
- Total annual revenue (range): $2 million–$10 million
- Percentage of revenue from procurement/supply: 100%
- Serves customers in Asia, Australasia, North America, South America and Western Europe
- Customers include Twitter, Owens Corning, Fitbit, Intuit, Splunk, Jo-Ann's, Shutterfly, Smuckers, Levis, Unified Grocers, Duke University, NCAA and Zebra Technologies
- Industries served include technology, manufacturing, retail, healthcare and hospitality
- Available modules: Sourcing, Auctioning, Pipeline, Intake, Contacts
- Other app integration: Salesforce and (coming soon) ServiceNow
Background & Overview
Some may question why anyone would launch a new business in the e-sourcing market. After all, the complexities of basic sourcing capability typically pale in comparison with what is required to tackle areas like procure to pay (P2P) and contract lifecycle management effectively, which is why so many second-generation vendors in these sectors have used new technology stacks to all but completely overtake early providers in capability (perhaps with the exception of SAP Ariba, which is still holding its own with growth). Moreover, there is arguably greater value from advanced sourcing approaches that begin to incorporate elements of total cost management, constraint-based optimization and supply chain network design than basic e-sourcing alone. Yet Scout RFP is proving the observation wrong. In North America, it’s adding customers faster than just about any other provider. The Scout RFP platform brings a set of integrated e-sourcing modules that can be enabled or disabled as necessary. The solution emphasizes simplicity and collaboration, with the goal being that users can be up and running with little or no training. It allows for integrated Slack-like team collaboration and features an API for data pull/push between other procurement (related) applications and Salesforce. Training is embedded through integrated walkthroughs and pop-ups, and the implementation time can be as little as a few hours. Competitors include:- SAP Ariba
- EC Sourcing
- Keelvar
- MarketMaker4/CSC
- Market Dojo
- Oracle
- Scanmarket
- SciQuest
- SourceDogg