SupplyHive
Supplier Performance Software
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50 to Know / 50 to Watch / Future 5
In Their Own Words: SupplyHive
SupplyHive is a Chicago-based technology company that provides Supplier Performance Management (SPM) software designed to help corporations centralize, standardize, scale, and automate the supplier performance process. SupplyHive uses the latest innovations of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze the aggregated quantitative and qualitative data. Our user-friendly interface helps organizations hold suppliers accountable and deliver enhanced partnerships by measuring KPIs, analyzing trends and identifies disparities, automating action plans, and providing predictive analytics.
Our View
2019 Future 5 nominee SupplyHive provides a tool for evaluating employee satisfaction with indirect suppliers by gathering and analyzing data about supplier performance while offering a streamlined, B2C-like consumer experience. To oversimplify, it’s Yelp for suppliers.
SupplyHive strives to help businesses improve their overall relationships with their suppliers. It does this by forming a 360-degree feedback loop, asking suppliers to rate themselves in the same categories as the buyers that reviewed them, as well as to rate the buying company itself.
SupplyHive subscribes to the philosophy that gathering and managing performance-related information (e.g., basic supplier info, performance metrics, action plans) does not constitute true supplier relationship management; rather, the process of gathering, measuring and managing feedback (from both sides of the relationship) is fundamental to nurturing and improving a relationship (or, in worst-case scenarios, in determining whether it’s time for a breakup).
SupplyHive describes this approach as acting like a marriage counselor and business coach for the buyer and supplier. Check out their vendor analysis Part 1, Part 2 in PRO for more.
So, why did SupplyHive make it onto the 2019 Future 5 list?
SupplyHive has entered the SRM market at an opportune moment. In the face of increasing automation and improving analytical technologies like AI, procurement professionals are feeling a growing urgency to extend their function’s value beyond transactional enablement alone. As such, strategically managing and developing relationships with suppliers has become a key focus.
Yet, while interest in the benefits of SRM-program investment — from incremental cost reduction to risk avoidance and service/quality-level improvement — has steadily risen, the needed professional skills and process-specific tools to support these efforts have comparatively lagged.
SupplyHive deftly offers a solution to both the skills and deficits that procurement is facing. And at the heart of it all, the vendor is laser focused on doing one thing extremely well — an approach its rapidly growing client roster seem to be validating.
Any threats or challenges ahead?
While SupplyHive does have a compelling value proposition for companies that currently run supplier performance management (SPM) programs, the vendor does not have as strong a case with businesses that aspire to run such a program, which, as research on procurement’s SRM maturity indicates, represents not a small number of procurement organizations globally.
If SupplyHive wants to expand its client base beyond just those businesses currently running SPM programs — which one could argue will eventually become necessary in order to attain true scale — it may need to explore untapped opportunities in product and ecosystem development.
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