This week’s SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews for SynerTrade, a source-to-pay suite provider. 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).
SolutionMap Insider members can read about SynerTrade 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.
Today, SIG, the premier membership organization for sourcing, procurement and outsourcing executives, and Spend Matters, the leading source for procurement solutions intelligence, announce a new partnership to provide SIG buy-side members with procurement solutions intelligence and services to help them advance their digital procurement efforts.
“Spend Matters is a trusted resource among procurement professionals,” says Dawn Tiura, President and CEO of SIG, the Sourcing Industry Group. “As the procurement technology marketplace becomes increasingly crowded, this partnership will provide valuable, time-saving market intelligence to SIG members who are looking to find the best vendors to meet their organization’s specific technology needs.”
KPMG is a noted procurement solutions and technology consultancy, with a large, mature and experienced global practice for systems integration (SI). It has developed working relationships with a range of technology firms, including Coupa, Ivalua, SAP Ariba, Oracle and most recently GEP. It has hundreds of customer deployments under its belt.
This Spend Matters PRO analysis provides background on KPMG’s systems integration/technology practice in the procurement solutions market. It includes facts and figures, like a list of how many people at KPMG are trained to implement each tech firm’s solution. But, primarily, this PRO analysis highlights the voice and experience of KPMG’s clients. We also offer data-driven recommendations and analysis for organizations considering KPMG as a systems implementation and consulting partner.
This report is based on extensive primary research by our Spend Matters team and from our SolutionMap’s customer reference process, where real-life customers share their vendor experiences and help us rank vendors. Spend Matters surveyed a range of KPMG clients in Q2 and Q3 2019, collecting qualitative and quantitative insights from organizations that had gone through implementations, change management, transformation and related initiatives as part of procurement technology deployments. KPMG also provided facts and figures about its practice directly to Spend Matters.
In this Spend Matters Nexus brief, we’ll look at Tips 11, 12 and 13 (out of 20) for maximizing seller outcomes for private equity, investment or strategic transactions.
Collectively, the Spend Matters team has analyzed hundreds of solution providers in the past two decades from a corporate development and private equity lens. We’ve also been involved on the other side of the transaction table as well, with sellers. Based on that experience, this series represents the comprehensive advice we would give sellers before a transaction to achieve the most advantageous outcome.
Today, we turn our attention to three areas: investment bankers (where they add the most value vs. not); the benefits of established “added” metrics to track the business; and explaining and justifying competitive differentiation in a manner that investors will believe (or not).
So far in this Nexus series, we covered the initial 10 tips to prepare for the process itself (see Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4).
Jason Busch is the 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).
Earlier today, Spend Matters reported that a $53 million Series A funding round was raised by Brightfield (TDX), formerly a consulting firm that became a provider of AI-derived market intelligence for the contingent workforce/services community. Spend Matters believes the size of the round — very large for a series A — is indicative of a number of factors beyond the fact that Brightfield (TDX) is a more mature organization in terms of product, customers and revenue than most companies going up for an earlier stage funding round.
Indeed, Brightfield “2.0’s” rapid data-driven success after its pivot — and the comparatively gargantuan investor vote of confidence at the Series A level — represent several converging trends. We will explore these in this Spend Matters Nexus research brief, which also provides overall analysis and key takeaways for services procurement providers, investors and practitioners. Our analysis begins with a company and solution overview of Brightfield and its TDX platform, Talent Data Exchange.
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).
Brightfield — a New York City-based artificial intelligence and big data analytics company that optimizes contract labor spend and program performance for employers, MSPs and staffing firms — announced today that it has received an investment of $53 million to fuel its market expansion and the continuing development of its platform, Talent Data Exchange (TDX).
The Series A round was led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation by MissionOG, CapitalOne Growth Ventures and Telescope Partners. A valuation for the company has not been disclosed.
Spend Matters has been covering Brightfield and the development of TDX for several years, and tracing the arc of Brightfield’s evolution from a consulting firm to a subscription-based data analytics platform business.
Read this coverage now and look for our analysis later.
“The days of chasing low-cost labor around the globe, manufacturing in one location and shipping things around the globe are numbered,” said procurement veteran Bill Michels, VP of operations for the Americas at The Chartered Institute for Procurement and Supply (CIPS).
The U.S.-China trade war is the latest development in a trend away from overseas manufacturing, said Michels, who in part 2 of our Q&A also discusses automation, reshoring, protecting intellectual property, and the fallout of Brexit if the U.K. splits with the European Union at the end of this month.
The Chartered Institute for Procurement and Supply (CIPS) is a well-known group for professional development and certifications. Its roots lie in Europe and Australia, but it has recently been expanding to the Americas.
For the past year or so, procurement veteran Bill Michels has been CIPS’ vice president of operations for the Americas, leading the group’s efforts to grow beyond its traditional areas.
To find out how that’s going, we caught up with Michels for a two-part Q&A series, where he discusses new CIPS’ initiatives, the lifecycle of a CPO, what it means to be strategic in the digital age, and the role of soft skills.
Digital transformation is impacting businesses all around the globe, with procurement functions in particular feeling the pressure to redefine their role within organizations. While some procurement professionals are still working to increase their percentage of spend under management and generate savings at a tactical level, the recently released World-Class Procurement: Redefining Performance in a Digital Era report from The Hackett Group highlights significant gaps between how a sample peer group of procurement departments operate and perform versus the top performing departments, or world-class procurement operations.
This final installment of our seven-part Spend Matters PRO series on GEP will look at how it compares to its competitors, like SAP Ariba, Coupa, Ivalua, Jaggaer, Corcentric’s Determine, SynerTrade, Wax Digital and Zycus.
Previous installments provided an in-depth look at GEP as a company (Part 1), its specific solutions (Part 2 and Part 3), and a detailed analysis of solution strengths (Part 4) and weaknesses (Part 5). A SWOT analysis and commentary followed in Part 6.
GEP competes in several market segments and brings varying degrees of capability, differentiation and strength in many areas. In certain segments of the market, it is more successful in positioning an overall suite value proposition rather than individual modules (individually or together) for several reasons. Clearly, GEP “keeps coming back to suite” as its technology mantra for good reason.
For example, Spend Matters’ analysis suggests GEP is stronger within the strategic sourcing services and solution areas than in the P2P components of its suite from an “absolute” functional capability perspective. Yet the provider is effective at selling both areas together when they are equally valued. GEP has indeed won some large-scale P2P customers, replacing other solutions, based on the integrated suite value proposition.
Or consider how GEP’s e-invoicing and e-payment capabilities are part of its integrated source-to-pay (S2P) suite solution but are not yet on par with specialist solutions. As another example, GEP has a strong analytics offering but typically positions it within the context of its suite, so while it could compete against specialists in this area, given its classification capabilities, it typically does not.
In this PRO analysis, we’ll set up our coverage primarily relative to technology application segments such as:
* Fully Integrated (and some “loosely coupled”) Source-to-Pay Suites
* Full P2P Suites
* End-to-End and best-of-breed strategic procurement technology (SPT) offerings
* e-invoicing and e-payment specialists
* Supplier and master data management (MDM) providers
But, we’ll also touch on major consultancies, BPO players and niche MSPs.
To highlight the most exciting procurement technology start-up companies in the world, Spend Matters is releasing its “Future 5” listing today in conjunction with the Digital Procurement World conference in Amsterdam.
Given the speed with which many procurement technology start-ups move from early-stage to market contenders, the Spend Matters team decided to issue this mid-year Future 5 listing of exciting players.
Mastercard is ramping up its effort to be a player in the B2B payments market by adding payment tools for Mastercard Track, its product launched in 2018 that intends to make inroads into the procure-to-pay technology space.
This week, Mastercard Track announced in a press release that it has added the product Business Payment Service, describing it as “a single connection bringing together multiple payment types, greater control and richer data to optimize B2B transactions for both suppliers and buyers.”
Automation of accounts payable and facilitating payments are hot topics in P2P, and Spend Matters’ analysts have been covering the issues with our PRO subscription series defining AP automation and an in-depth look at Mastercard Track, introducing its capabilities and analyzing its potential to disrupt the market.
