As procurement organizations have become increasingly global and digital, the amount of data they create has exploded. This has made finding and managing spend data all the more complicated, to say nothing of analyzing and making decisions based on that data. To keep up, procurement groups are increasingly investing in spend analytics tools, and the software market has responded in kind. New spend analytics vendors emerge each year, while suite providers continue to acquire leading providers, hoping to integrate standout capabilities into their offerings.
Between these upstarts and end-to-end offerings sits Sievo, one of the oldest independent providers in the market today. The Helsinki, Finland-based spend analytics provider has succeeded in its chosen solution area by continuously improving its product, using feedback from its customers to adapt its technology to changing procurement requirements.
Spend Matters today released its Q2 2018 SolutionMap, ranking 40 procurement software companies across nine different solution categories, including E-Procurement, Sourcing, Spend Analytics, Supplier Relationship Management and Contract Lifecycle Management, in addition to end-to-end suites and their capabilities. So what's new this quarter? Read on to take a peek under the hood.
This Spend Matters SolutionMap Insider Release Note provides insight into the Q2 2018 SolutionMap release for Source-to-Pay, reviewing the process that we followed for this inaugural release.
The providers in the Q2 2018 Source-to-Pay SolutionMap include Determine, GEP, Ivalua, SAP Ariba, SynerTrade and Zycus. All of these providers were required to participate in SolutionMap for each underlying module, as well. These individual areas include Sourcing, Spend and Procurement Analytics, Supplier Relationship Management & Risk, Contract Lifecycle Management, E-Procurement and Invoice-to-Pay. All of these providers are also included in the individual Strategic Procurement Technologies (SPT) and Procure-to-Pay (P2P) suite views.
This SolutionMap Insider research note provides insight into these and additional considerations in the Q2 2018 SolutionMap release. The Source-to-Pay customer data set is composed of a subset of the 700+ individual organization references included in the overall SolutionMap scoring as of Q2 2018*.
*Customers using more than one module that a vendor provides can opt to fill out a single survey within each individual suite area (e.g., a customer using two modules for P2P and four modules for SPT would only need to fill out two surveys).
This Spend Matters SolutionMap Insider release note provides insight into the Q2 2018 SolutionMap release for Sourcing, Spend and Procurement Analytics, Supplier Relationship Management & Risk, Contract Lifecycle Management, and Strategic Procurement Technologies Suite SolutionMaps, reviewing the process we follow and highlighting what has changed since the last release.
Within the individual areas covered in this brief, the following provider has been added to the Q2 2018 release: Bonfire. Additionally, providers such as EC Sourcing, Ivalua, and SynerTrade have received updated scoring following the submission and demonstration of new capabilities based on production releases of individual modules. (Non-GA capabilities are not considered in SolutionMap scoring.) Perhaps most important, over 100 new customer references were added in the Strategic Procurement Technology areas for Q2.
This SolutionMap Insider release note explores these and additional changes in the Q2 2018 SolutionMap release.
In November 2017, the popular online retailer ASOS introduced a new “try before you buy” service. The scheme, as the name suggests, allows customers to order multiple items — say, the same shirt in different sizes, or different items altogether — and try them on. Then customers can return the items they do not want, and ASOS charges only for the items they keep. This flexibility may be helping e-commerce businesses win market share, but for many retailers, the inevitable flood of returns make for a growing risk, a report from Brightpearl finds.
In the first installment of this series, we outlined a handful of the key product differentiators that winnow the provider playing field down to those that can meet your needs. Today in the second part of this series, we’ll finish the discussion by moving into some extended spend analytics (i.e., beyond forensic spend history reporting) and broader supply analytics that are worthwhile to consider.
Why focus beyond basic spend analytics? The answer is simple: to find more value opportunities. And you don’t want to run out of runway with your current provider if you want to evolve your analytics journey beyond analyzing the “exhaust” of your value chain (i.e., spend).
But if you want to extract more value from your spend, you have to extract more insights around demand and from “supply” (i.e., categories, suppliers, costs and multitier value chains). With that, let’s dive into these areas.
Spend Matters welcomes this guest column from Naseem Malik and Nick Lazzara of MRA Global Sourcing.
Having attended several ISM annual conferences as both a participant and the past few years as a CLC member, I’m always struck by the energy, enthusiasm and growing excellence when it comes to this evolving function. As the quality of the conference has improved via content and companies represented, it has steadily bolstered the number of attendees every year, culminating to their highest turnout to date this year.
This is the second installment of our series focused on cutting through the noise and evaluating procurement solutions on the few key requirements that truly differentiate the providers in the marketplace today. Although it is easy to dive into the dense forest of detailed functional requirements and technical requirements of a solution area, it's critically important to pull back and strategically look at what you are really trying to accomplish with a solution.
This is particularly important in the area of spend analytics. In fact, just defining your overall analytics scope and strategy is half the battle in determining the class of solutions you should approach before even diving into the features and functions of individual providers. There are also other key considerations that focus on technical aspects of the solution relative to master data management, big data, market intelligence, AI and more that have a real business impact on procurement centers of excellence looking to drive more insight and value from not just internal spend but external supply data. Your strategy and approach in selecting providers is also crucial so that you can drive short-term results, while also giving yourself the option value to evolve to into new areas.
In a rapidly changing market of technology and service delivery providers, it has become increasingly challenging for many of today’s procurement leaders to both keep up with the pace of change to find true differentiation across the evolving vendor community. Most of the leading procurement organizations we have worked with in the past 12 months are focused on the following strategies: fold more spend under management, more quickly identify and tackle savings opportunities, and drive more value to internal stakeholders. Spend analysis is core to meeting these strategic goals.
Supply chain has been a part of Neta Berger’s life for well over a decade, starting from her high school DECA days to her supply chain management studies at Arizona State University to Google, where she currently works as a supply chain program manager. Risk mitigation is a central part of Berger’s role at Google, and she certainly has ample experience in this area. Berger was working as a commodity manager at Cisco at the time of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and she managed daily meetings focused on resolving immediate shortages.
Spendata is one of the first third-generation spend analytics platforms that takes analytics out of the fixed data warehouse world and into the modern big data era, where you can do the analysis you want, when you want, where you want and how you want. As it runs in the browser, your only restriction is an OS that runs Chrome (which are 99% of the OS deployments). And you don't have to worry about whether or not the vendor is GDPR compliant, because the data stays on your machine.
This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Snapshot explores Spendata’s product strengths and weaknesses, providing facts and expert analysis to help procurement organizations decide whether they should shortlist the vendor. It also offers a critique of the user interface. Part 1 of our analysis provided a company background and detailed solution overview, as well as a summary recommended fit suggestion for when organizations should consider Bonfire in the sourcing technology area. The final installment in this series will offer a SWOT analysis, user selection guide, competitive alternatives, and additional evaluation and selection considerations.
There are two views one can take of spend analysis. The modern view envisions that all of the data needs to be centralized in a data warehouse, business intelligence (BI) or spend analysis tool in a single standardized hierarchy agreed upon by the entire organization. The belief is that there needs to be only one view into a single version of the truth before any (spend-related) progress can be made. This desire to find the be-all single spend taxonomy structure bolted onto a corporate data warehouse is a fool’s errand because there is no single hierarchical structure that represents the multi-variate richness of spend/supply data that category managers need to extract value. For more on this topic, see here.
Then there is the postmodern view, where success depends upon taking appropriate action on whatever data you can get, whenever you can get it, in whatever form it's in. Any intelligence is better than no intelligence, and any savings or value you can identify today is worth more than the hypothetically better savings that you might identify next week, next month, or, more likely next quarter or year (which is likely how long it will take to agree on a common schema, collect all of the data across the organization, categorize it, cleanse it and enrich it). And while more data can allow for the identification of bigger opportunities, it's often not worth waiting until you have it all to start the analysis and start pursuing those opportunities that are available today.
In this series we are going to talk about a new and disruptive spend analysis solution that adopts the postmodern view of spend analysis, where a practitioner should be able to take action on any data she can get her hands on whenever she can get her hands on it and take immediate action wherever and whatever. This includes the situation where the practitioner already has access to an enterprise data warehouse or business intelligence solution, because the data doesn't always get into that solution right away — and even if it does, it's not always the case that the schema of the data warehouse or business intelligence solution will support the type of analysis that the practitioner needs to do.
