This week’s SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews for Taulia, which offers payment processing solutions. Its applicable SolutionMap category for this report is in Invoice-to-Pay. SolutionsMap Insider members can click here to read about Taulia in our latest report.
In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary of qualitative — and select rating and quantitative — insights from the SolutionMap peer review process. The Customer Insights summary 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.
This week’s SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews for SpendHQ, a specialist in analyzing spend data that uses cloud-based software to organize and remove unnecessary data and provide spend visibility. Its applicable SolutionMap category for this report is in Spend Analytics.
SolutionMap Insider members can click here to read about SpendHQ in our latest report.
Spend Matters today released its Q2 2019 SolutionMap, ranking 54 procurement software companies across 12 solution categories, including E-Procurement, Sourcing, Spend Analytics, Supplier Relationship Management, Contract Lifecycle Management and Contingent Workforce & Services. Click on this article to learn about SolutionMap's biggest revamp yet, and to see how to access rankings for free!
This week’s SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews of Tradeshift, which is known for its marketplace service, global invoice processing, payment capabilities and financing support. Tradeshift’s applicable SolutionMap categories for this report are in E-Procurement, Invoice-to-Pay and Procure-to-Pay.
Spend Matters’ analysts have been writing personal essays on their favorite SolutionMap personas: Nimble, Deep, Turn-Key, Configurator and CIO Friendly, as well as Optimizer for sourcing providers and Global for CWS vendors. The personas help companies select which solution provider is right for them. This week’s essay is by Nick Heinzmann, an associate analyst and a former editor of Spend Matters.
Let’s be blunt: If you’re going to pay five or six figures for a software license, you’d better hope your employees actually use it. But can your technology provider guarantee that everyone who uses the system — from admins to power users to the everyday requisitioner or collaborator — will adopt it? What about enjoy it, willingly log in and encourage everyone to collaborate on the platform?
For many companies, this is easier said than done. Implementations that seem well planned on paper can quickly become nightmares. Systems with deep, powerful functionality but archaic user interfaces can scare less ambitious users back to the warm embrace of Excel.
Issues like the above and others are why I love the Nimble persona — that best at understanding the “millennial” mindset when it comes to technology. Why can’t procurement software be as fun and easy to use as apps like Instagram, Venmo and Slack?
This week’s vendor spotlight in the SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews of the source-to-pay suite provider Zycus, whose applicable SolutionMap categories for this report are in Source-to-Pay, Procure-to-Pay and Strategic Procurement Technologies.
SolutionMap Insider members can click here to read about Zycus in our latest report.
In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary of qualitative — and select rating and quantitative — insights from the SolutionMap peer review process. The Customer Insights summary 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.
Spend Matters’ analysts have been writing personal essays on their favorite SolutionMap personas: Nimble, Deep, Turn-Key, Configurator and CIO Friendly, as well as Optimizer for sourcing providers and Global for CWS vendors. The personas help companies select which solution provider is right for them. This week’s essay is by Xavier Olivera, our lead analyst for P2P, e-procurement and e-invoicing and who runs Spend Matters Mexico/Latin America.
Regarding solutions for any company, I like the pragmatic, the simple and the beautiful, I think there is no place for the “nice to have,” the unnecessary or the ugly. On the other hand, in a changing, multipolar and competitive world such as business, being resilient and possessing the ability to change course when circumstances require it is undoubtedly a necessity, not nice to have.
This week’s vendor spotlight in the SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews of the suite provider Oracle, which we rank in the areas of e-procurement, invoice-to-pay and procure-to-pay.
SolutionMap Insider members can click here to read about Oracle in our latest report.
In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary of insights from the SolutionMap peer review process. The Customer Insights summary 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.
Spend Matters’ analysts have been writing personal essays on their favorite SolutionMap personas: Nimble, Deep, Turn-Key, Configurator, CIO Friendly as well as Optimizer for sourcing providers and Global for CWS vendors. The personas help companies select which solution provider is right for them. This week’s essay is by Michael Lamoureux, our lead analyst for strategic procurement technologies and a futurist.
My favorite persona is the one we don't publish — the whole nine yards, which is basically the raw Solution Map with every single requirement evaluated and weighted full. It's a persona that almost no vendor would do well in, so why is it my favorite? Because it gets to the heart of what the vendor can't do and what its limits are.
The market for vendor management system (VMS) solutions has undergone two major structural shifts over the last few years.
At the end of 2016, Beeline shrank the total pool of available vendors when it merged with IQNavigator, creating the largest independent, pure play contingent workforce and services procurement technology provider by a significant margin. The two VMS solutions — now a single entity under the Beeline brand — are being converged and replatformed into a unified offering (BeelineOne) while developing innovative approaches to external workforce sourcing and management requirements. Facilitating this effort is the private equity firm New Mountain Capital, which acquired Beeline in July 2018 and has been working to strengthen Beeline’s competitive positioning, especially against the VMS market’s largest offering, SAP Fieldglass.
But in late 2018, a new competitive threat emerged, one that could turn the current “Big 2” VMS provider dynamic back into a “Big 3.” This of course was Coupa’s acquisition of DCR Workforce, which catapulted the source-to-pay suite provider (and arch competitor with SAP Ariba) into the top tiers of contingent workforce and services procurement technology capability. Coupa has branded the current and eventually integrated and replatformed capabilities as Coupa Contingent Workforce (CCW). While Coupa previously did provide baseline support for contracted-SOW services through its Services Maestro module, the acquisition allows Coupa to expand its offering and provide the same range and types of capabilities that would generally be found in leading VMS solutions. Even as the full integration of the acquired DCR capabilities will take time, CCW already poses a competitive threat to the likes of SAP Fieldglass (recently consolidated with SAP Ariba and SAP Concur in the newly formed SAP Intelligent Spend Group) — and, of course, Beeline.
The rapid evolution of the “new” Beeline and Coupa’s surprise leap into the upper tiers of the VMS market raises the question: How do the two vendors stack up in a head-to-head bout? After all, competitive matchups between the two are already becoming a more frequent event, and both help set the average functional benchmark score in Spend Matters’ Q4 2018 Temp Staffing SolutionMap. (The Q4 results are labeled Coupa but look specifically at the DCR solution pre-acquisition because the integrated Coupa-DCR solution is still pending and has not been reviewed for SolutionMap.)
Join us in this unfiltered SolutionMap results analysis from our Q4 2018 dataset as we look at the two top ranked contingent workforce/VMS providers, along with the commentary of the Spend Matters analyst team. Bear in mind, the scores/ratings in this analysis are now approximately 9 months old, and some of the score differentials may have changed — however, we have no reason to believe significantly.
These “Head-to-Head” reports share the insights of each quarterly SolutionMap report for SolutionMap Insider subscribers, providing unique comparative cuts of SolutionMap benchmark data along with the trademark quips that Spend Matters was better known for in its early years. So buckle your seat belt, prepare for some real data and expect a few sparks to fly as we pit Beeline and Coupa against each other in the vendor management system evaluation ring.
Not yet an Insider member? Here’s a preview: In certain temp staffing categories — which include Supplier Management, Candidate Evaluation/Selection/Submissions, Change Order Management, Engagement Management, On/Off-boarding, Rate Management, Requisition Creation and Approvals, Time and Expense and Worker Compliance — Beeline convincingly comes out on top. In others, it’s darn close, with Coupa coming out on top, or the two achieving a statistical tie. And in at least one area, Beeline delivers an unquestionably superior score.
Overall, the results suggest that the right solution will vary based on different organizational requirements. There’s no debate that VMS/temp staffing selection processes will reward procurement organizations that tailor provider selection to their specific needs.
This week’s vendor spotlight in the SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews of the suite provider Basware.
In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary of qualitative and quantitative insights from the SolutionMap peer review process. The Customer Insights summary 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.
When considering a technology solution, businesses trying to maximize their objective functions face trade-offs among different factors, including costs, capability, speed and risk.
I’ve been thinking about this as the analysts at Spend Matters consider their favorite SolutionMap persona: Nimble, Deep, Turn-Key, Configurator, CIO Friendly as well as Optimizer for sourcing providers and Global for CWS vendors. The first two personal essays on buying personas went Deep and with Configurator.
