In our last post, we noted that, as written by the doctor and the prophet over on Spend Matters Pro (membership required) in the PRGX Intro, PRGX is one of a select number of dominant services provider in the niche market for recovery audit services — a market that unlike other procurement services faces tremendous price pressure for its core recovery, statement and related auditing and profit recovery services but also a vendor that has started to remake itself quietly from within.

As a result, as indicated in our last post, PRGX has built the most complete, and in many ways the most advanced, analytics and recovery solution for the retail sector and, in doing so, has built one of the most complete and advanced analytics and recovery solutions for just about any sector that buys and relies on goods. It does this via two platforms, Optix, which has deep Payment, Spend, and Product analytics, and Lavante, which has deep SIM and automated recovery prevention analytics. (We expect they will eventually be merged, but, for now, they are separate.)

As we have covered Lavante multiple times in the past, we’re going to focus on introducing the features of Optix.

Spend Optix

Spend Optix is designed to help an organization get deep insight into their category spend like a typical spend analysis platform for Sourcing and Procurement. Reporting revolves around categories and suppliers. It is also the only PRGX product that today has a built-in report builder, which can build spend reports across pre-defined dimensions and fields. The product is designed to help you understand spend category performance, spend under contract, invoice-vs-supplier insights, item price variance, and commodity cost indices.

This product can also be configured to track all contracts, all meta data of interest, and relate the contracts to the relevant categories and products. This allows a user to drill into a contract from a category, a category from a contract, and create accurate “address spend” reports, as will be described below. The ease of use is not at the level of Lavante SIM, but we expect that will change over time.

Payment Optix

Payment Optix is designed to help an organization get deep insight into their payments and related metrics and, in particular, DPO (days payable outstanding), PO (purchase order) vs. Non-PO spend, deep AP analytics, and risk insights.

The home screen, as with the other OPTIX products, is a dashboard with key metrics and graphs, such as invoices processed by month, DPO, Benford’s law (by invoice amount or value), and related metrics that an organization wants to see on a daily basis. The platform is drill-down report oriented, and the reports are segmented into Invoice Processing, DPO, and Risk Management.

Product Optix

Product Optix is designed to help an organization get deep insight into their product pool, including net margin, equivalent products, and best supplier funding opportunities. Reporting revolves around categories, suppliers, and deals.

The best part is the product detail report which brings up not only detailed product information, but the most complete product margin breakdown report you ever did see. With their extremely strong background in retail, PRGX understands true lifecycle margin calculations as good as anyone and it shines through in their report.

This is just a brief overview of what PRGX can do. For a much deeper dive, see the Pro series (Part I, Part II, and Part III) by the doctor and the prophet over on Spend Matters Pro (membership required) that also dives into strengths and weaknesses and a very detailed SWOT analysis to help you understand where they fit.