Amazon Business launched in 2015 with a goal of addressing the needs of business customers who loved shopping on Amazon. These customers had specific unmet expectations for business purchasing in the consumer-centric experience. Amazon Business now provides “Everything you love about Amazon, for your Business.” Right from the start, some of our most enthusiastic customers were Prime members. It turns out that business customers loved fast, free shipping and wanted business benefits too. Business Prime provides business customers the familiar Prime shopping experience employees love at home, with plans and benefits suited for work.
During a routine meeting with one of our clients, the Chief Procurement Officer at a large Fortune 500 company, we were struck by something this person said: “I feel like I’m wearing so many hats these days, I need a hat stand to keep them all in one place!” Our client’s observation encapsulated something we were starting to see more often: a dramatic broadening of the role of the CPO.
A mere decade ago, a CPO’s job, while often difficult, was relatively straightforward: Find the best deal possible when sourcing raw materials or setting up production. But increasingly, that’s a fluid concept. What’s more, the changing nature of both technology and the manufacturing workforce has pulled CPOs into decisions that were once outside their purview.
Intrigued, we wanted to delve deeper into this trend, and we decided that this would be a fascinating area of focus for our annual “Chief Procurement Officer Survey.” Every year Deloitte conducts this global, cross-industry study to take the pulse of sourcing and procurement professionals. So, this year we’ll be exploring the role of the CPO — how it is evolving, and how procurement leaders are navigating and mastering complexity in the areas of technology, workforce management, and both the business and political environment.
In our last Spend Matters PRO post, we introduced you to Promena, an 18-year-old provider based out of Istanbul that is deploying a platform for strategic sourcing, supplier management and e-procurement. Operated under the umbrella of Zer, a procurement BPO firm that itself is a subsidiary of Turkey’s largest industrial conglomerate, Koç Holding, Promena has a solution with a long history of development and some relatively mature functionality despite its lower name recognition in the global procurement technology market. And while its newest modules are still finding their footing amid a rapidly changing sector, the solution overall offers a strong baseline off which Promena could expand it functional footprint.
Part 1 of this brief provided an overview of Promena’s offering and a short selection requirements checklist that outlined the typical company for which Promena might be a good fit. In Part 2, we provide a breakdown of what is comparatively good (and not so good) about the solution, a high-level SWOT analysis, and some final conclusions and takeaways.
At EqualLevel, we believe that procurement leaders need more than visibility and flexibility, they need intelligence. Leveraging the power of advanced data analytics and emerging artificial intelligence technologies, the EqualLevel Savings Advisor (ELSA) doesn’t just document what was purchased, when, by whom and for how much, but, most critically, it will capture the user justification for any choice that diverges from established corporate procurement parameters in a structured report that can be analyzed by management. We call this “the power to know.”
When asked to name the top locations of technology and startup ecosystems, one could be forgiven for not including Turkey. Globally, cities like London, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Singapore and San Francisco hold much of the technology economy mindshare, and recent political volatility in Turkey has not bolstered the country’s image as a stable place to start a business.
Yet Turkey has a lot going for it these days in terms of technological potential. As of 2017, the most recent year for available data, Turkey’s internet penetration rate was nearly 65%, giving the country Europe’s fifth-largest online population. Use of mobile devices is also relatively high, at 86% of the population. What’s more, Turkey’s demographics skew heavily toward younger generations: more than half of its 82 million inhabitants are under the age of 30, many of whom are enthusiastic about accessing and growing the technology economy in their home country.
And this technological potential is not just recent. In fact, when it comes to procurement technology, Turkey’s representative offering, Promena, has been refining its product for nearly two decades. Started in 2001 as a joint venture between Koç Holding, Turkey’s largest industrial conglomerate, and The Carlyle Group, Promena offers solutions for e-sourcing and e-auctions, spend analysis, supplier management and e-procurement. Now fully owned and operated under the umbrella of Zer, a procurement BPO firm also owned by Koç, Promena today counts more than 100 customers, with more than 11,000 sourcing events and $2 billion worth of transactions flowing through the platform.
This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Introduction offers a candid take on Promena and its capabilities. The brief includes an overview of Promena’s offering, a breakdown of what is comparatively good (and not so good) about the solution and a selection requirements checklist for companies that might consider the provider.
In April, Basware held its Customer Connect user event in Chicago. During a mainstage talk and break-out sessions, the procure-to-pay provider highlighted a number of recent enhancements and product roadmap areas, including the continued incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) throughout its product line. Based on these presentations and recent Spend Matters SolutionMap RFI analysis, this three-part Spend Matters PRO brief highlights selected recent product enhancements as well as what Basware has in store for AP and procurement customers in the quarters to come based on its product roadmap. It also provides deeper insight into how Basware is embedding AI across its procure-to-pay solutions.
The following enhancements are covered and analyzed (with key takeaways included) in this research brief:
— Approval Confidence Scoring/Index
— Committed Spend
— SmartPDF (Basware’s version of InvoiceSmash/Cloudscan)
— Payment Plan Compliance
— Intelligent Order Aggregation
“You start with having your business challenges in mind,” says Michel Janssen, one half of the "CRO-to-CRO" discussion pairing we've been spotlighting with a series of videos over the last couple of weeks.
Recently, Janssen — chief research guru of Everest Group, a research and management consulting firm based in Dallas, Texas — had a chance to sit down with his former colleague Pierre Mitchell, chief research officer of Spend Matters.
In Episode 3 of this video series, the two CROs share a comprehensive framework they call a digital capability platform, which paints a holistic picture for prospective buyers. Ultimately, through this framework, Janssen and Mitchell uncover what is available to buy (point solution or suite?), how a buyer can bundle solutions and/or capabilities, and who owns — or should own — the responsibility for digital decision making.
Each year, some companies on Spend Matters’ 50 Providers to Know list and the list of 50 to Watch honorees here in the Spend Matters Almanac push themselves beyond simply a standout performance.
They earn the recognition that they are not only bringing innovation into procurement organizations but also leading the charge to change the way we do business for the better. These are the providers who shifted from Watch to Know in 2019, like Corcentric.
To learn more about these providers, we reached out to a few such cases in our 2019 50/50 lists, asking how they’ve changed over the years and what differentiates them from the competition. Today’s Q&A features Corcentric President and COO Matt Clark.
If your B2B e-commerce system is not yet capable of digitally integrating with your customers' procurement systems, you are leaving a lot of business on the proverbial table. And we mean a lot of business. So let's dispel four common myths about the benefits and challenges of developing and maintaining a punchout-enabled e-commerce storefront. If not done well, it can derail the supplier journey before it even gets started.
Remember when you could only book a flight by calling a travel agent? Or do a banking transaction by visiting the nearest branch? Buy insurance only through an agent? Shop for a new house only by reading the local newspaper classifieds, or search for a plumber or doctor only in the Yellow Pages?
The way consumers buy services now has been massively digitized, with the enormous benefits of great selection, convenience and value for all of us. Yet most business-to-business services are bought today in the same way they were bought 20 years ago. That still largely depends on a phone call between a business stakeholder who has a need and someone they trust to broker the work. That someone is often a senior executive in a large firm, who then rallies a team to prepare a proposal that will be presented to the buyer in person.
Procurement has come a long way from the 1980s, when it was simply a transactional function, up until today, when talk of artificial intelligence, blockchain, RPA, process mining and rapid self-service are all the rage.
Recently, Pierre Mitchell, chief research officer of Spend Matters, had a chance to sit down with his old friend and former colleague Michel Janssen, chief research guru of Everest Group, a research and management consulting firm based in Dallas, Texas.
In this second episode of their video series, watch as both CROs explore how the role of procurement has changed over the years, from buying at the lowest price, to total cost of ownership, to ever more complex layers of risk mitigation & value creation — and what it all has to do with "Minority Report."
What happens when two chief research officers of two esteemed research firms sit down together for a video series chat? The viewer is in for a treat — an insightful series of video discussions on digital procurement transformation and the state of procurement overall. Recently, our own Pierre Mitchell, chief research officer of Spend Matters, had a chance to sit down with his old friend and former colleague Michel Janssen, chief research guru of Everest Group, a research and management consulting firm based in Dallas, Texas.
