ScoutRFP – Spreading their Silicon Sunlight from the Western Shore

When we last covered ScoutRFP back in 2014, they were hoping to help laggard Procurement organizations leave the dark ages (Part I and Part II) and enter the modern age. Launching with nothing more than an easy RFP solution (which was a 15 year old solution at the time), ScoutRFP has taken off like a rocket in those organizations that needed an easy, lightweight, solution for everyday events with a price tag they could afford.

The RFP solution was, and still is, 100% SaaS and designed to work with minimal inputs. It guided the user through a minimal workflow to create the RFX, select the suppliers, evaluate the responses, and make a decision. It was very flexible, allowing the user to create the RFX to the level of detail they wanted, or keep it high level (and cut and paste the instructions and questions from Word). And it gave the organization visibility into, and some control of, spend. The CPO could define a hierarchy and see what everyone was doing, the directors could see what their teams were doing, and the buyers would see their events — and all the reports could roll up as well. It was simple, but it hit the suite spot of low complexity and low price for organizations trying to crawl out of the unlit Procurement dungeons.

It was such a hit that, based on this capability and reception alone, ScoutRFP was able to secure $2.75M of funding in 2015 (from NEA, Zapis Capital, and Google Ventures) to extend the platform and raise an additional $9M of funding this summer in a series A funding round. And move west (to San Francisco).

Since then, ScoutRFP has added basic e-Auction capability, project management and savings tracking, Supplier Information Management, and an improved Supplier Portal.

The platform now has the ability to track all requested, current, and upcoming sourcing events and their associated status; categorize the events using any desired organizational categorization scheme; quickly initiate new events (RFX or Auction) from the pipeline; and even auto-include re-sourcing events when contracts are set to expire. Requested events can come from any organizational stakeholder with budget or spending authority, and all spend can be placed under (minimal) management.

In addition to this new project management capability, the savings tracking capability can sum up all savings for a period of interest, in real-time, based upon (negotiated) price differentials and (expected/purchased) volumes, or savings numbers (to date) provided by appropriate Procurement or AP reps. The data is tracked in a drillable fashion and a manager can quickly see how the totals compare across categories, departments, and employees. This allows the manager to ensure that high-value categories get sourced first and that buyers who aren’t delivering value get training (or replaced).

The SIM functionality is basic. It allows the organization to track all supplier information of interest, tag the suppliers with key-phrases of interest (for quick selection by category capability, geography, performance, etc.), and build lists for quick selection in sourcing events. There’s no scorecarding or performance monitoring, but it can be used as a supplier master and it’s easy to get data in as supplier data can be loaded from existing platforms, and updated data can be pushed back out to existing platforms, using the API. And the platform makes it easy to track supplier activity — events they participated in, questions they asked, bids they made, and so on.

In the current version of the platform, suppliers can have their own portal where all of the bids they have been invited to by all of their customers are accessible through a single log in, or, if the supplier prefers [or customer(s) demand(s)], they can have a separate portal for each customer. The suppliers also have the same collaboration features available to the buyers and can invite their peers to collaborate on bids and survey responses.

The system is shaping up nicely and for an in-depth dive on ScoutRFP, and the platform, including its strenghts and weaknesses, see the recent Pro series [membership required] over on Spend Matters (Part I, Part II, and Part III) [membership required] by the doctor and the prophet.