Sponsorship Content

Spend Matters welcomes this sponsored guest post from Brian Miller, vice president of services at Intesource, a PROACTIS Company.

The grocery and retail markets are highly dynamic and exceptionally competitive. Facing historically tight margins due to the extensive resources it takes to keep product quality high, procurement teams in these sectors need to be on top of their game in order to compete and remain financially viable. Business today isn’t easy, but in the face of all these pressures, many grocers and retailers are thriving. What’s their secret? Incorporating a sophisticated, strategic approach to sourcing as part of their overall procurement strategy.

In May of 2015, C2FO released the results of a survey of more than 1,000 US business owners’ thoughts on improving working capital efficiency. The survey explored trends associated with financing, working capital deployment and late payments.

In this Q&A, we explore the key questions and analyze how the responses point toward some important insights into buyer and supplier relationships.

Yesterday, we welcomed Trade Extensions to Spend Matters as an Associate Sponsor. Trade Extensions is getting into a level of complexity that enables sourcing and procurement to cross over into supply chain, with only a handful of other providers (e.g., SciQuest/CombineNet and BravoSolution) doing the same. Consider the following case example of a direct mail project.

Here at Spend Matters, we admit to favoring certain areas of procurement technology in our coverage over others. Sourcing is one of these, owing to my own roots in the profession (five years at FreeMarkets before launching this site). Yet sourcing technology has come such a long way in this time. And one of the absolute technical and functional leaders in the space is one that our North American readers may not be as familiar with, compared with others in the sector. This provider, our latest Associate Sponsor, is Trade Extensions. This Swedish company is an impressive one, and here is why.

Warning: shameless plug ahead! On a restless night last week, I decided to do a quick count of how many sponsors of Spend Matters’ had been acquired in recent years. Not counting Ariba, to whom we’re eternally grateful for their initial support upon starting the site, the number is staggering: Eight. That’s right, eight sponsors – at least by my count – have been acquired in recent years (counting Ariba, it would be nine).

We're excited to announce that D&B recently joined Spend Matters' sister-site MetalMiner, as a lead sponsor, and opted to maintain a presence on this site […]

Spend Matters rarely has much movement in the sponsor areas. We have limited the number of sponsors at any one time since the site was […]

We're excited to announce Zycus as a new Spend Matters affiliate sponsor. Welcoming Zycus to Spend Matters (and Spend Matters UK/Europe, where they've become an […]

We're excited to announce that Seal Software has joined Spend Matters as an Associate Sponsor. Seal Software is a provider of two distinct product lines […]

I'm pleased to announce that SciQuest, Inc. has joined Spend Matters as an associate sponsor. SciQuest is a provider of cloud-based source-to-settle solutions, with a […]