It’s no secret. Organizations are losing millions due to cost volatility, supply disruption and non-compliance fines. An ever-increasing pace of business and rising levels of uncertainty within our global economy have brought about an alarming amount of potential pitfalls for procurement leaders. This means risk management has been more of a top priority than ever, and procurement is on the front line of managing that risk. The good news is procurement has a secret weapon: contracts.
As the pace of business continues to accelerate, procurement has been recognized, and rightly so, as a fundamental business enabler and strategic function. Now it’s time for the next step. The priority of achieving sustainable cost reduction and reducing risk has met a new role: enabling agility. Considering the current hyper-competitive and fluctuating state of global business, the question procurement should be looking to answer is, How do you move fast while also remaining compliant?
What happens when a 120-year-old Danish wind energy company entrusts its contracts to a then three-year-old American solution provider? The companies in question are Vestas, which traces its lineage back to 1898, and SirionLabs, a contract management provider that goes all the way back to 2012. Last year, Jason Busch analyzed SirionLabs’ solution for Spend Matters PRO, and he concluded that the vendor would be a good fit for companies with “multi-year strategic supplier relationships encompassing complex services and solutions,” for whom “insufficient supplier governance is leading to lost savings and value creation opportunities.” This certainly sounds like Vestas’ situation before 2015, when the company implemented Sirion.
In today's contract lifecycle management (CLM) environment, the contract aspect gets all of the TLC while the lifecycle and management aspects often fall by the wayside. Enter Spend Matters analysts and SirionLabs with this complimentary research brief now available for download.
Where Contract Lifecycle Management Technology Approaches Come up Short and How to Fix Them provides organizational strategies and tactics to bridge the technology gap in your team's CLM function. Highlights include:
AnyData Solutions is not just a standalone spend analytics toolset that includes “the basics.” Rather, it is a standalone platform for capturing, managing, sharing and collaborating on structured datasets of any type.
As an end-to-end analytics platform, AnyData is quite different from other approaches to spend analytics on the market today. On many levels, AnyData is closer to the data-centric heritage of BIQ, as it is fundamentally a self-service analytics solution, compared with the vast majority of spend analytics providers, which prefer to handle cleansing and classification activities “as a service,” even if they offer to sell the classification engine separately (which rarely happens).
This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Snapshot explores AnyData’s strengths and weaknesses, providing facts and expert analysis to help procurement organizations and other customers decide whether AnyData is the right fit for their need. The first installment provided a company and solution overview and a recommended fit list of criteria for firms considering AnyData. Part 3 will offer a SWOT analysis, user selection guide, competitive alternatives and additional evaluation and selection considerations.
The Spend Matters team has learned the situation of the Emptoris business unit within IBM appears to be in flux, according to several sources. Spend Matters received a briefing from IBM in Q4 2016, during which time the company shared a number of 2016 enhancements Emptoris had made to its product suite focused on usability. Yet recent events suggest the overall future of Emptoris within the IBM portfolio remains uncertain. Spend Matters has spoken to numerous customers, partners and others close to the organization in recent days and has learned about significant changes that appear to be taking shape.
The case study results are in. The University of Chicago Medicine (UCM) deployed a source-to-pay (S2P) contract management technology platform to address their non-labor expenditure reductions. Spend Matters' Xavier Olivera will join the discussion to address the key procurement software trends within the S2P landscape. This webinar will take place March 8th, at 1 p.m. CST, and is sponsored by Ivalua.
The University of Chicago's School of Medicine saved $12 million after successfully deploying a cloud-contract management technology platform. How did they do it, and how can you apply their strategies to your organization? We have the case study results and will present them this Wednesday, March 8, at 1 p.m. CST, during the Spend Matters webinar Keeping Pulse of Your Suppliers and Contracts Using Technology. Sign up today!
For those of you who missed it, last week Spend Matters Founder Jason Busch presented a webinar live from the U.K., with Spend Matter UK/Europe Managing Director Peter Smith some 50 feet away, doing another webinar live. “It’s the first time we’ve had two analysts in the same building doing a webinar at the same time,” Busch said. Busch’s webinar, Sourcing, Contract and Supplier Management: Predictions and 2017 Tech Trends, looked at four areas within the strategic procurement technologies landscape — spend/supply analytics, strategic sourcing (e-sourcing), supplier management and contract management.
Join Spend Matters, MetalMiner, Ivalua and the University of Chicago Medicine for our upcoming webinar that will outline the results of a case study on UChicagoMed's successful deployment of a cloud-contract management technology platform. Spoiler alert: It yielded major savings. Xavier Olivera of Spend Matters Mexico-Latin America will frame the discussion with the evolution of procurement software in the S2P software landscape, spend management trends in healthcare and more.
There are several customer and technology trends to look at for strategic sourcing, not to mention spend/supply analytics, supplier management and contract management. These and other topics are just samples of what Spend Matters Founder Jason Busch will be discussing on today’s webinar, Sourcing, Contract and Supplier Management: Predictions and 2017 Tech Trends, at 1 p.m. CST. If you want to stay on top of all the latest technological advancements and make the smartest investments for procurement analytics, sourcing, contracting or supplier management efficiencies, this is a webinar not to miss.
Spend Matters has often noted that the market for strategic sourcing solutions is highly fragmented, with no clear leader or collection of leaders. This stands in contrast to the e-procurement and invoice-to-pay markets, where best-of-breed vendors are still thriving but consolidation among larger providers is influencing industry dynamics and many selection processes. Yet within the strategic sourcing market, it is difficult to point to any single vendor or set of vendors, look at any metric and say anything but vendor fragmentation is the rule.
This is both a positive and negative for providers like eBid Systems, given the challenge of competing against so many providers rather than aiming at a single target. Within this competitive environment, this final installment of our Spend Matters PRO Vendor Snapshot series covering eBid Systems offers a competitive analysis and comparison with other strategic sourcing providers for shortlist consideration. It also includes a SWOT analysis, user selection guide, summary evaluation and selection considerations. Part 1 and Part 2 of this PRO research series provided a company and deep dive solution overview, product strengths and weaknesses and a recommended fit analysis for what types of organizations should consider eBid Systems.