Many procurement technology firms have a short history before flaming out or being acquired, but one stalwart firm has hit a rare milestone — and has secured a strong future for itself. Scanmarket, the Denmark-based provider of strategic sourcing software, turned 20 this year — and made sure that the family business will carry on with the same mission. To learn more about what it takes to run a long-standing best-of-breed sourcing business, we talked to Scanmarket CEO Betina Nygaard for her insights about the past and the future of e-sourcing. "I think the e-sourcing process will change completely," she said.
This Spend Matters SolutionMap Insider research note provides insight into the Q4 2019 SolutionMap release for Sourcing, Spend and Procurement Analytics, Supplier Relationship Management & Risk, Contract Lifecycle Management, and Strategic Procurement Technologies Suite SolutionMap areas, reviewing the process we follow and highlighting what has changed since the last release.
Within the individual areas covered in this brief, the following providers have been added to the Q4 2019 release:
— Promena is a new participant in the Sourcing SolutionMap category. — Spendata is a new participant in the Spend & Procurement Analytics SolutionMap category. — Vendorful is a new participant in the Sourcing and Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) & Risk SolutionMap categories.
Wax Digital has added a new category to its existing participation this quarter: Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM).
In addition, 31 new or refreshed customer references (and 51 individual map references) were added in the Strategic Procurement Technology areas for Q4 2019.
The Q4 2019 SolutionMap marks the first time Jaggaer solutions have been evaluated against Q2 2019 RFI requirements by the Spend Matters analyst team, and are able to again appear in this quarter’s editions of the Provider Scoring Summaries.
(SolutionMap Insider members: access the Q4 Provider Scoring Summary reports right here.)
Direct materials sourcing is the elephant in the procurement technology suite room. While many source-to-pay solutions offer strong functionality in support of sourcing processes, only a handful truly support all of the requirements to enable the complexities of direct materials sourcing (e.g., sourcing optimization, bill of materials-based sourcing, commodity management).
Among this select group, Synertrade is capable of delivering a comprehensive, fully integrated and rapidly deployable source-to-pay suite that also provides organizations the ability to rapidly configure heavy internationalization and systems integration requirements. This is particularly visible in its sourcing module, where it scores above the benchmark for two-thirds of requirements evaluated, including dozens of cases where it posts some of the highest scores of any provider in the Sourcing SolutionMap.
But where does Synertrade stand out most and help “set the bar” in sourcing, and why should this matter for procurement and finance organizations? Let’s delve into the SolutionMap benchmark to find out where Synertrade is great.
“What Makes It Great” is a recurring column that shares insights from each quarterly SolutionMap report for SolutionMap Insider subscribers. Based on both our rigorous evaluation process and customer reference reviews, each brief offers quick facts on the provider, describes where it excels, provides hard data on where it beats the SolutionMap benchmark and concludes with a checklist for ideal customer scenarios in which procurement, finance and supply chain organizations should consider it.
Let’s take a closer look at the Premier Inc. acquisition of Medpricer announced recently. For this Spend Matters PRO brief, we talked with leaders of both firms to get further insight into the acquisition and what it means. We also offer some reasons why this development is significant for procurement practitioners. Premier Inc., a $1.2 billion diversified healthcare improvement company, has acquired Medpricer, an innovative solution provider focused on the management of the enormous and largely unmanaged “purchased services” category of spend within hospitals and healthcare systems.
Premier bought Medpricer for $35 million and expects the acquisition to be modestly accretive in 2020. The company has stated that Medpricer will continue to operate as an independent unit and brand, and will remain GPO neutral, while augmenting Premier’s own technology and analytics capabilities. Medpricer’s CEO will continue to lead the business as part of Premier’s Supply Chain Services segment.
Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Premier describes itself as “a leading healthcare improvement company, uniting an alliance of more than 4,000 U.S. hospitals and health systems and approximately 175,000 other providers and organizations to transform healthcare.” The company leverages integrated data and analytics, collaboratives, supply chain solutions, and consulting and other services to promote "better care and outcomes at a lower cost.” It also collaborates with members “to co-develop long-term innovations that reinvent and improve the way care is delivered to patients nationwide.”
“Medpricer’s spend management platform,” the company has noted, “uses artificial intelligence to validate, compare and onboard purchased services suppliers; track and measure spend by category, supplier and facility; benchmark contracts terms to ensure competitive rates; set and manage specific savings targets; and manage contract compliance.” It was also noted that purchased services — which “often fall outside the scope of national group purchasing contracts” — are estimated to “account for up to 30% of a typical healthcare provider’s non-labor expenses, and represent a total addressable acute care market of approximately $160 billion.”
Premier told Spend Matters that “Medpricer is an important component of its evolving cost management strategy and is an integral next step in our continuing expansion toward a fully integrated purchased services platform.” Premier also noted that it has the “ability to fund and materially accelerate the development of Medpricer’s offerings.”
Spend Matters recently posed some questions to Premier. We received written answers and also had an opportunity to talk with Premier’s Senior Vice President of Supply Chain, David Hargraves, and Medpricer’s President and CEO, Chris Gormley.
Yesterday, AP automation specialist Medius announced it was acquiring Wax Digital, the UK-based source-to-pay suite provider. Together, they hope to carve out a unique niche in targeting procurement and finance organizations primarily in Europe and North America (although both have global customers and users).
In Part 1 of this Spend Matters Nexus series, we provided an overview and introduction to Wax Digital and Medius, touched on the product strengths and weaknesses for Wax, and explored the rationale for the transaction.
As we continue our analysis today, we add in the customer voice to the mix, specifically focusing on Wax Digital’s economic buyers (e.g., CPOs, procurement VPs, etc.) and what they think about the solution, because customer feedback is one way we score solutions for our free vendor ranking system, SolutionMap. We also will go deeper on some of the more specific strengths of the solution at the platform and functional levels, and explore how this might affect users of the combined solution. And we’ll look at integration touchpoints for Wax and Medius.
Later this week and next, we will continue our exploration of the combination, delving into the impact on the competitive landscape, including an analysis of how the combination may affect competitive AP automation and invoice-to-pay vendors as well as procure-to-pay and source-to-pay suites. Finally we will explore how the total addressable market (TAM) expands when combining finance and procurement together. TAM is a key metric that sponsors use to analyze investment opportunities.
Jason Busch serves as Managing Director of Spend Matters Nexus, a research and advisory group that works with sponsors, CEOs and boards on due diligence, M&A strategy and product strategy. Spend Matters and Spend Matters Nexus are owned by Azul Partners. Disclosure: Azul Partners served as an adviser to Marlin Equity in this transaction.
This week’s SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews for Keelvar, an e-sourcing vendor known for its sourcing optimization software.
The applicable SolutionMap category for this report is in Sourcing.
SolutionMap Insider members can click here to read about Keelvar in our latest report.
In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary of details from the SolutionMap peer review process. It includes ratings on how well the vendor meets its customers' expectations, three key differentiators for the vendor and a list of quotes from customers about the vendor’s greatest strengths.
Earlier in the week, the finance and HR solutions provider Workday announced it was buying Scout RFP, a sourcing solution for those who would rather use Uber than maintain an old car (I make this observation with full cynicism intended because my 25-year-old car has been in the shop for three of the past six months ).
You can find previous free coverage of the transaction news on Spend Matters here and here. In our first Nexus subscriber brief covering the procurement technology sector’s M&A news, we offered background on Scout RFP, explored the provider’s strengths and weaknesses, and gave our initial insights into the rationale for the transaction. The second brief explored the competitive implications of the transaction on Workday’s ERP competitors.
As we continue our analysis on Spend Matters Nexus, we turn our attention to landscape implications of the transaction that may affect other, specialized procurement technology providers. We also offer lessons learned for this group as well in terms of what really matters with driving customer success, growth and, subsequently, valuation. Today’s research brief provides a competitive analysis for the source-to-pay suite market segment (e.g., Corcentric, Coupa, Ivalua, Jaggaer, SAP Ariba, SynerTrade, Wax Digital and Zycus) as well as specialty providers that emphasize the sourcing area. U.S. and European sourcing specialists include Allocation Network, Bonfire, EC Sourcing Group, K2 Sourcing, Keelvar, MarketDojo, Promena and ScanMarket and my favorite, at least for its name, SourceDog.
Since the other dog is my car right now and I’m late for a meeting, let me call that proverbial Uber and get on with this analysis.
Jason Busch serves as Managing Director of Spend Matters Nexus, a membership, research and advisory organization serving technology acquirers (private equity, corporate development, etc.) and CEOs in the procurement and finance solutions marketplace (including contract management, B2B marketplaces/connectivity, indirect procurement, services procurement, direct procurement, commodity management, payment, trade financing, GRC/third-party management and related adjacent sectors).
This week’s SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews for the suite provider Determine, a Corcentric company.
The applicable SolutionMap categories for this report are Source-to-Pay, Procure-to-Pay, and Strategic Procurement Technologies (SPT includes Sourcing, Analytics, CLM and SRM). Determine has been bought by Corcentric. Integrations between the two provider platforms are not factored into the Customer Insights analysis, which is entirely based on Determine’s capabilities.
SolutionMap Insider members can read about Determine in our latest report.
In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary of details from the SolutionMap peer review process. It includes ratings on how well the vendor meets its customers' expectations, three key differentiators for the vendor and a list of quotes from customers about the vendor’s greatest strengths.
The needs of each procurement organization — as well as procurement-solution providers’ organizations — are too nuanced for “one size fits all”-style rankings and recommendations from other industry intelligence firms and experts. That’s why Spend Matters ranks procurement and supply chain software providers through the prism of buying personas. With the Q3 2019 SolutionMap released today, let's revisit why this is an essential approach to the procurement technology market.
This Spend Matters SolutionMap Insider research note provides insight into the Q3 2019 SolutionMap release for Sourcing, Spend and Procurement Analytics, Supplier Relationship Management & Risk, Contract Lifecycle Management, and Strategic Procurement Technologies Suite SolutionMap areas, reviewing the process we follow and highlighting what has changed since the last release.
Within the individual areas covered in this brief, the following providers have been added to the Q3 2019 release:
— K2 Sourcing is a new participant in the Sourcing SolutionMap category. — Orpheus is a new participant in the Spend & Procurement Analytics SolutionMap category.
Wax Digital has added a new category to its existing participation this quarter: Supplier Relationship Management and Risk.
In addition, 38 new or refreshed customer references (and 76 individual map references) were added in the Strategic Procurement Technology areas for Q3 2019.
The following providers still did not update their scoring based on the new Q2 2019 RFI 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. We expect most of them to participate in upcoming Q4 2019 or Q1 2020 releases.
In Source-to-Pay: — SAP Ariba, Jaggaer (Indirect, Advantage, and Direct)*
In stand-alone Sourcing: — Keelvar and Scout RFP
In stand-alone Spend and Procurement Analytics: — Opera BIQ
In stand-alone Supplier Relationship Management and Risk: — Aravo and Sourcemap
* As Jaggaer has unified three of its product lines — Jaggaer Indirect, Jaggaer Direct and Jaggaer Advantage — into Jaggaer One, which allows customers and prospects to select the best modules from each offering to fit an organization’s unique needs, Spend Matters has broken out the naming convention for the Jaggaer offerings more specifically for Q3 2019 SolutionMap in the persona ranking graphics as follows:
— Jaggaer One is Jaggaer Sourcing, Jaggaer Supplier Management, Jaggaer Spend Analytics, Jaggaer Contracts+, and Jaggaer eProcurement, and corresponds to what was formerly Jaggaer Indirect. — Jaggaer One+ is Jaggaer Sourcing+, Jaggaer Supplier Management+, Jaggaer Analytics+, and Jaggaer Contracts, and corresponds to what was formerly Jaggaer Advantage. — Jaggaer One Direct is Jaggaer Direct Sourcing and Jaggaer Direct Supplier Management and corresponds to what was formerly Jaggaer Direct.
Please note: as none of the Jaggaer solutions have yet been evaluated against Q2 2019 RFI requirements by the Spend Matters analyst team, they are not able to appear in this quarter’s editions of the Provider Scoring Summaries. Please refer to the Q1 editions for their latest scoring.
This SolutionMap Insider research note provides insight into the methodology and additional changes in the Q3 2019 SolutionMap release.
(SolutionMap Insider members: access the Q3 Provider Scoring Summary reports right here.)
This Spend Matters SolutionMap Insider release note provides insight into the Q3 2019 SolutionMap release for Source-to-Pay, reviewing the process that we followed for this quarter’s release.
The providers in the Q3 2019 Source-to-Pay SolutionMap include Coupa, Determine, GEP, Ivalua, 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.
SAP Ariba 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. We expect them to participate in upcoming releases.
The Source-to-Pay customer data set is composed of a subset of the 831 individual organization references included in the overall SolutionMap scoring as of Q3 2019*.
This SolutionMap Insider research note provides insight into the nature of the expanded RFI, methodology, customer references and additional changes in the Q3 2019 SolutionMap release.
(SolutionMap Insider members: access the Q3 Provider Scoring Summary reports right here.)
*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).
Do you ever feel like you’ve been winning the battles but still losing the war? In the art of war, military strategists are required to look beyond short-term skirmishes, where little if any ground is gained, and instead focus on a vision for victory in the longer term. That doesn’t mean suddenly pulling your forces from the front or ignoring enemy advances but has more to do with creating a better line of sight between the guys in the trenches and the generals in the tents.
Joonas Jantunen, Cloudia’s CEO for the Middle East, sees a similar distinction to be made in today’s business procurement wars. Every large procurement function aspires to be strategic, but most are running their operations on short-term tactics.
Strategic sourcing, in contrast, sets out to align all sourcing practices with an organization’s long-term business objectives, with a view to creating new and sustainable value.
