Contract Management Content

The Spend Matters SolutionMap Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM): Provider Scoring Summary is only available to SolutionMap Members. This SolutionMap analyzes a select group of Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) providers. It is part of our Q2 2019 SolutionMap report series, also featuring spend analytics, sourcing, supplier management (including supplier information management, performance management and risk management), e-procurement and invoice-to-pay providers.

This SolutionMap Insider research note provides insight into the nature of the expanded RFI, methodology and additional changes in the Q2 2019 SolutionMap release.

This Spend Matters SolutionMap Insider release note provides insight into the Q2 2019 SolutionMap release for Source-to-Pay, reviewing the process that we followed for this quarter’s release.

The providers in the Q2 2019 Source-to-Pay SolutionMap include Coupa, Determine, GEP, Ivalua and SynerTrade. 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.

The five providers above have updated their RFIs and received updated scoring following the submission and demonstration of new and updated capabilities based on production releases of their platform. (Non-GA capabilities are not considered in SolutionMap scoring.)

SAP Ariba and Zycus did not update their scoring and, as a result, had their scores adjusted based on a common shift factor (that preserves positional integrity relative to peers) and any platform updates, or lack thereof, that the analysts have received since the last time the RFIs were filled out. These providers requested a short-term delay because of the intensive nature of the expanded RFI (with nearly 800 requirements for Source-to-Pay), but we expect them to participate in upcoming 2019 releases.

The Source-to-Pay customer data set is composed of a subset of the 792 individual organization references included in the overall SolutionMap scoring as of Q2 2019*.

This SolutionMap Insider research note provides insight into the nature of the expanded RFI, methodology, customer references and additional changes in the Q2 2019 SolutionMap release.

*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 need to fill out only two surveys).

Q2 2019 marks the fourth research cycle for Spend Matters’ Contingent Workforce & Services (CW/S) “enterprise technology” SolutionMap, the sourcing and management of three underlying spend categories:Temp Staffing, Contract Services/Statement of Work and Independent Contract Workers (ICW).

The providers in the Q2 2019 CW/S SolutionMap include Beeline, Coupa (formerly Coupa-DCR Workforce), Field Nation, Shortlist, SirionLabs, TalentNet, Talmix, TalonFMS, Upwork Enterprise, Vndly and WorkMarket (ADP).

Given Spend Matters’ procurement orientation, we evaluate “enterprise technology” vendors within a source-to-pay (S2P) reference model. In other words, we look at vendors in terms of their capabilities that address some or all enterprise requirements that arise within an S2P lifecycle (i.e., from supplier sourcing to worker or supplier payment).

In this CW/S research cycle, there were no new providers, and again limited participation in the Temp Staffing and Contract Services/SOW SolutionMap categories. However, a good number of key vendors have expressed interest in participating in upcoming cycles.

There continues to be vibrant interest in participation by vendors in the emergent Independent Contract Workers (ICW) SolutionMap category.

We have gathered extensive business profile information, received 75 customer survey references and have assigned scores to specific solution capabilities (RFI line items) ranging from well over 100 to about 300, depending upon how many SolutionMap categories a particular vendor participated in.

This SolutionMap Insider research note provides insight into our methodology and additional changes in the Q2 2019 SolutionMap release.

This week’s SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews for SirionLabs, a specialist in contracts. Its applicable SolutionMap categories for this report are in Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) and Contract Services/SOW.

SolutionMap Insider members can click here to read about SirionLabs in our latest report. In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary of feedback that includes ratings on how well the vendor meets user expectations, three key differentiators for the vendor and a list of quotes about the vendor’s greatest strengths.

Contract management can seem like a boring topic in business — corporate attorneys taking far too long to create long documents of “legalese” designed around transferring risk to your trading partner in a deal. Managing these contracts in contract lifecycle management (CLM) is a step in the right direction by cross-functionally managing them throughout various business processes: order-to-cash, source-to-pay, hire-to-retire, record-to-report, etc.

Some organizations will even take contract management a little further and use the nomenclature of commercial management to help shift the focus away from the contractual artifact and more toward commercial business relationships. The focus becomes writing and managing better contracts to incentivize trading partners to more easily comply, collaborate and create a larger pie of value to share.

However, there is a subtle shift happening within the scope of contract and commercial management (CCM), and a not-so-subtle shift that is also happening within the digital realm (e.g., namely artificial intelligence, low-code platforms, open source, “XaaS”). What’s happening is that as contracts get digitized and more deeply modeled, they are becoming the single most important piece of master data within the enterprise that touches virtually every single stakeholder within these core processes and also within corporate functions such as R&D, risk management, strategic planning, treasury, audit, sustainability, digital/innovation and others.

The cornerstone to this transformation (in the private sector at least) is the notion of maximizing value created in commercial activities. Commerce is about exchanging value. Good commerce strives to maximize value for individual parties (i.e., large slice of the pie) and excellent commerce focuses on maximizing value to expand the total economic pie within a value chain. On the sell side, you want to deliver differentiated value to customers in order to retain them and make more money off them over the long term. On the buy side you want to maximize value (i.e., the most “bang for the buck”) by maximizing “bang” (what suppliers commit to deliver to you) and minimize the bucks (spend/costs) flowing out the door. These commitments of expected value to be delivered can take many forms, and using next-generation contract modeling (way beyond tagging and analyzing clause text) and process integration is turning out to be a very practical way to maximize value from the C-suite down to various functional process participants.

In this Spend Matters PRO series, we’ll cover some of the ways in which next-generation contract management (and underlying digital platforms) will model and manage commercial value much more deeply in a way that will support enterprise processes in areas such as GRC (governance, risk and compliance), Treasury, FP&A, IT service management, project/program portfolio management, commodity management, supply chain execution and many other areas.

Delays of cargo movement at the U.S.-Mexico border are adversely affecting business prospects of American companies. Coupa announced today that its acquisition of Exari is settled, giving the suite provider advanced CLM capabilities. And a new survey predicts that as much as 90% of blockchain-based supply chain initiatives will suffer ‘blockchain fatigue’ by 2023. Afternoon Coffee: merging & acquiring your attention (hopefully) for procurement and supply chain news.

Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Marko Rossi, product manager for Cloudia, a source-to-pay provider.

Dynamic purchasing systems have advantages over the venerable framework agreement, which has been the go-to structure for public sector authorities looking to procure goods and services for many years. Designed to remove uncertainty, traditional framework agreements typically bind vendors and authorities into four-year relationships that ensure all parties within the agreement commit to each other for the long term.

This works perfectly well — if the pace of societal and economic change is serene. The world today doesn’t quite fit this picture. A supplier that meets buyer requirements today may go out of business tomorrow, or their circumstances may change so drastically that they may struggle to fulfill their contractual duties.

Dynamic purchasing systems (DPS) were purpose-built to address these flaws. Read on to find out the three reasons public sector tenders should use DPS.

Coupa just announced that it intends to acquire Exari, a leading provider of contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions. Terms of the deal were not provided, but with Exari having almost 150 employees, it’s not unreasonable that the private firm would have over $30 million in revenues and a deal size valued at just over nine figures. Contract management is a red-hot space right now, and Coupa has a very strategic need for this product. Spend Matters believes that this acquisition is a very smart hand-in-glove acquisition even though it’ll require some alterations to truly fit properly.

Coupa currently has a basic contracting module as part of its “Business Spend Management” application suite within the source-to-pay market, but it was missing two critical aspects of modern CLM that are major strengths for Exari. On a product functionality basis, Exari is one of the very top performers in Spend Matters’ CLM rankings on SolutionMap, and it “ticks all the right boxes” for a best-of-breed CLM performer. It’s also unique in its knowledge-based approach to deep contract modeling rather than just straight AI and machine learning based on contract text analytics.

CLM is also not a one-size-fits-all proposition, and the market landscape depends heavily on many factors. Some providers are much more oriented toward the sell-side — e.g., CPQ-oriented providers such as Apttus or SpringCLM (recently acquired by DocuSign). Some are focused on the mass market with usability being a key focus (e.g., Concord, Outlaw, PandaDoc, etc.). And even within large enterprises looking at firms like Exari, Icertis, Agiloft, SirionLabs, and others, they differ in their requirements as to whether they want “deep” functionality, maximum configurability, ease-of-integration, attractiveness to many functions (e.g., the legal department), and/or being part of a larger application suite.

So, what is Coupa getting with Exari? What types of organizations are the best fit for this solution and the combined solution of Coupa and Exari? Is Exari a solution optimized for legal, procurement or both? And what will Coupa need to do to integrate Exari since this acquisition is not some simple bolt-on, but rather, a core platform component? Finally, what is the impact of this acquisition on the S2P and CLM markets?

This Spend Matters PRO quick take analysis provides insight for Coupa customers and the broader market on specifically what the provider is acquiring. Unlike past acquisitions, we believe Exari represents the greatest stretch away from its core economic buyer (at least historically). Find out why.

For an introduction to Exari, we encourage you to read our Spend Matters PRO review: Introduction & Solution Overview, Strengths/Weakness and Market/Competitive Analysis.

With its announced intent to purchase Exari, Coupa has completed a full circle of acquisitions to bring best-of-breed applications to each area of the Strategic Procurement Technology (SPT) category of Spend Matters’ SolutionMap as Coupa expands beyond its original P2P roots.

Earlier acquisitions of Trade Extensions, Spend360 and Hiperos helped Coupa assemble an SPT jigsaw puzzle for sourcing, spend analytics and supplier management, and Exari, with its AI-based approach to deep contract modeling and analytics, represents yet another piece of an emerging tableau. And a critical one at that: In many ways, CLM forms the critical link within Coupa’s source-to-pay suite between upstream sourcing activities and downstream P2P, meaning there are significant opportunities to mine here for Coupa users in areas such as risk management, strategic supplier relationship management and, of course, savings generation.

Yet in addition to the question of how Exari fits into the larger Coupa strategy puzzle, there is also a relevant one about how the vendor fits into Coupa’s current CLM product strategy (and current contracts application), from a feature-function angle as well as a technical (integration) perspective.

As the Spend Matters Contract Lifecycle Management scoring in SolutionMap illustrates, Coupa’s current CLM capabilities are stronger in some areas than others, whereas Exari’s help set the benchmark in many areas.

When brought into Coupa, Exari would theoretically help close some of the gaps in Coupa’s offering relative to best-of-breed pacesetters, as well as suite competitors that have made investments in strong CLM capability.

The technical reality, however, is not quite as simple. Exari itself is a vendor built somewhat from acquired solutions, and while its CLM capabilities are best-in-class, its three main components (contract parsing, template creation and core CLM features) are all built on different technology stacks.

So where do Coupa and Exari fit together, and what are their areas of comparative strengths and weaknesses at the time of the acquisition?

This Spend Matters SolutionMap analysis provides an overview of the two providers’ capabilities, their comparative rankings in the CLM category and what combining the solutions into one offering could look like. It uses as the basis of comparison the Q1 2019 SolutionMap for Contract Lifecycle Management, which analyzes 13 vendors across dozens of functional categories, including contract creation and authoring, core contract modeling, analytics, expiry and renewal management, and compliance.

Coupa Software is buying Exari to gain its best-of-breed contract lifecycle management (CLM) offering, Coupa announced Tuesday morning. Coupa, a San Francisco-area suite provider of business spend management (BSM), said in a news release that the transaction for Boston-based Exari is expected to close in its second fiscal quarter. In a disclosure to investors, it said the aggregate purchase price for the transaction is about $215 million in cash.

Exari is a top performer in Spend Matters’ CLM rankings on SolutionMap, and it is unique in its knowledge-based approach to deep contract modeling rather than just straight artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning based on contract text analytics.

This Q1 2019 SolutionMap analyzes a select group of strategic procurement technology suite providers (inclusive of spend analytics, sourcing, supplier management and contract lifecycle management).