The Conferences Category

Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Doug Hudgeon, a business automation expert.

The annual Amazon AWS Re:Invent conference has just finished. The most interesting announcement in the conference was not one of high-profile changes to their serverless and machine learning platforms. The most interesting announcement was a three-minute video about Textract, a new OCR (optical character recognition) service from Amazon. This service extracts text and tables from documents and is priced at $1.50 per 1,000 pages.

The Textract OCR service is interesting for three reasons, each of which is worthy of an article in itself, but we'll briefly look at all three here and the industries that are affected.

As students went back to school and businesses shook off the haze of a sultry summer, the procurement world kicked off fall with bang. Leaving little time to reorient after Labor Day, we saw major acquisitions in several sectors of the procurement software market, along with new insights from the fall conference circuit and continuing developments in the tense global trade environment.

Take some time this Thanksgiving weekend to catch up on our most-read coverage from Fall 2018 and prepare for the end of the year with the latest news and research on Spend Matters PRO and SolutionMap Insider.

Am I the only one who missed seeing Roy Anderson on stage in the last few years? Roy is an illustrious (and animated) CPO — and he's back in the game in a dual role as Tradeshift’s internal CPO and as its digital transformation officer. He’s also externally facing with Tradeshift customers and partners. Today in New York, Roy took the stage at Tradeshift’s analyst event, combining his mix of standup (think "Car Talk" meets procurement) and storytelling.

I touched down in New York City today for a quick stop at Tradeshift’s fall 2018 analyst day. The theme of the event is marketplaces, a topic that brings me back nearly 20 years to the heyday of the B2B marketplace era. But now — unlike when Commerce One, Tradex (which Ariba purchased), Metiom, i2 TradeMatrix and all the industry-based “exchanges” looked much better in PowerPoint than they performed in theory —  the technology to support them is real.

The Spend Matters team is on the ground at Coupa Inspire 2018 EMEA, in London, where Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn kicked off the event by reiterating the company’s vision through a letter-by-letter explanation of Coupa’s name. We’ve covered this approach to defining Coupa before, and while the attributes of openness, usability, prescriptive and acceleration are all of course applicable, we respectfully disagree with choice for “C.” While Coupa is indeed “comprehensive,” there is a better choice: community.

Procurement has made significant strides in supporting supplier relationship management initiatives, but poor investment in technology could limit the potential benefits those programs can deliver in the years to come, according to State of Flux, a consulting firm that specializes in SRM and which held its annual SRM summit in Chicago on Oct. 23. Over the decade that State of Flux has monitored SRM maturity, procurement organizations have made considerable improvements in several areas — but not in adopting and using technology dedicated to SRM.

As the second day of Zycus’ Horizon customer event kicks off in Virginia (see day one coverage: Facts/Investment/New AI Direction and Building the Partner Ecosystem) we thought it would be useful to distill what we’ve learned so far as the global provider (now with about 1,000 employees) continues to build out its procurement technology suite. From the various main stage sessions and conversations we had with key Zycus personnel, we can segment Zycus’ product/solution strategy into three areas.

Earlier Monday at Zycus’ Horizon annual customer event in Virginia, CEO and founder Aatish Dedhia provided significant evidence that his source-to-pay firm has responded to the need to build out a global partner ecosystem, especially one centered on local customer implementation and enablement. Zycus global implementation/enablement partners now include over 35 organizations.

Fellow Spend Matters analyst Xavier Olivera and I touched down last night in Leesburg, Virginia, to attend Zycus’ annual customer event, Horizon. It feels like the source-to-pay provider’s largest annual conference yet. In a series of posts today and tomorrow, the Spend Matters team will provide live coverage from the event. Zycus CEO Aatish Dedhia kicked off the morning keynote session with an update on the firm he started. Here are some of the highlights.

Most procurement groups are coming around to the idea that they need digital transformation. Yet even with a convincing case for taking an AI-based “cognitive” procurement approach to processes like sourcing, excuses about bad data and poor backing from management inevitably stop organizations from taking the first step. LevaData, like other solution providers, is increasingly trying to help procurement not just take on technology but create the roadmap for organizational maturity that leads to better business outcomes.

APICS announced recently it was launching a new supply chain organization that would push the industry association out of its niche for talent development and into corporate transformation strategy. Called the Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM), the new organization seeks to create a fully encompassing group for all professionals who touch the supply chain. More than a rebrand, the creation of ASCM signals a shift in strategy at APICS as well as within the businesses of the customers that the association serves, APICS CEO Abe Eshkenazi told Spend Matters in a recent interview at the APICS 2018 conference in Chicago.

Spend Matters attended ADP Analyst Day last week, held at the ADP Innovation Lab in New York City. At more than $13 billion in annual revenue, ADP is the largest provider of payroll services and one of the largest providers of human capital management (HCM) solutions in the world. Over the past six decades, ADP built its business on the basis of the permanent W2 employee workforce. But as we all know, nothing is permanent — particularly in workforce, where for businesses and workers things are becoming increasingly contingent. And ADP, which acquired WorkMarket earlier this year, is clearly rising to meet the changes in the market, on both the business and worker side. As you might expect, this is not a casual undertaking for ADP but a studied, strategic initiative now moving into gear.