Kodiak Hub is a relatively new Swedish solution for Supplier Relationship Management. Founded in 2015, it primarily served the Nordics for its first few years but began its expansion into the DACH and UK Regions during COVID (and even serves the NA market, although they don’t plan to tackle the NA market until the coming year).

A visit to its site might lead you to believe it’s a category management platform, billing itself as the starting point in a journey towards smart strategic sourcing, but that’s not quite what it is, or at least not where it’s found its niche and its true capability shines.

It’s true capability shines in sustainability, responsibility, risk assessments, and performance evaluations of suppliers, and their products, where those suppliers are creating (custom) (build-to-order) (manufactured) products where regulations need to be adhered to, carbon/GHG needs to be reported, and the organization needs to ensure they are acquiring a sustainable product (or service) as well as a sustainable supplier.

It’s primary platform is organized into three sections: Insights, Impact, and Intelligence along with a home dashboard that visually shows you the regions of all of your global suppliers and allows you to hover over those regions to see the number of suppliers, the regional economic rating, and the Country safe(SOURCE)^TM Rating.

The safe(SOURCE)^TM Rating is one of the truly unique capabilities of Kodiak Hub and one of the capabilities that positions it as a strong Sustainable Supplier Relationship Management platform. Using indices and public data sources, it is able to create a regional risk assessment profile that allows an organization to quickly spot geopolitical, environmental, and sustainability risks even before sending out an assessment to a supplier, and to create a generic risk profile when specific information is (not) yet available. When this is combined with local economic indicators (to spot risks of [significant] currency fluctuations, increased bankruptcy, etc.) as well as the ability to pull in credit scores (from credit agencies) (with appropriate data feed subscriptions), it provides an organization relatively deep insight into what expectations it should have for a supplier even before analyzing its policies, practices, and external assessments.

The supplier profiles or scorecards that Kodiak Hub can maintain are quite extensive, allowing an organization to maintain all the compliance, performance, risk, and sustainability data it needs on suppliers, products, and services to power its supplier management, sourcing, and procurement. It supports all standard company profile data, including supplier type and spend totals, detailed (customizable) assessment data, detailed on-site audit data (which will override the existing data as necessary), (third-party) risk/ESG/CSR data/rankings/metrics, externally computed KPIs, and related company, product, and service linkages. It can also store any and all documents of relevance or interest (insurance, certification, specifications, contracts, etc.).

Insight is the entry point to the platform’s supplier, product, and services summary screens that capture, and allow a user to query, all of the data associated with a supplier, product, or service.

Impact allows you to create and dive into (data-driven) supplier assessments, (onsite) supplier audits, KPI-based evaluations, and identified actions (in progress).

Assessments are unlimited and can be on the supplier in general, specific products or services, and even restricted to specific category management or sourcing projects. They can cover quality, health and safety, compliance & governance, human rights, environmental, business, product, information security, and other areas of relevance to the organization and use pre-built (template) questionnaires, customized variants, or custom questionnaires.

Right now, even though they can be assigned a “type”, actions are essentially requests to the suppliers with an integrated messaging trail for asynchronous communication that allows suppliers to ask questions, buyers to provide answers, and action states to be recorded (pending approval, in progress, completed, etc.). Future versions of the platform will contain specific types to ensure necessary information is captured, processes and workflows are followed, interim checks and approvals are in place, and so on.

Intelligence is its integrated analytics platform that allows a procurement professional to analyze suppliers across campaigns, projects, KPIs, assessments, categories, products, capabilities, etc. Relationship managers and buyers can create custom dashboards and reports, and customize the pre-built dashboards as needed.

The UX is very clean, modern, broken into logical segments, and very easy to use. It’s intuitive where to go to get the information you need and how to update new information when it comes in. This reviewer finds it so intuitive that he believes you can jump in and be productive with it without any training whatsoever.

So if you’re looking for a great supplier relationship management platform to manage your sustainability efforts and assess your supplier risks, we recommend you include Kodiak Hub in your shortlist.