Category Archives: Best Practices

It Doesn’t Matter Where You Start, You End with BoB in SXM!

In a recent article, we asked in the battle of Suite vs. BoB (Best-of-Breed), which do you choose, and ended up with the answer of neither, but potentially both, because, as indicated in our article we asked in our post on Where’s the Procurement Management Platform, you need a true platform (that enables the creation of a true source-to-pay plus ecosystem for the various workflows and processes that need to be managed).

As a result, we indicated you could start where you wanted, provided:

  • you could conceivably manage it (if you don’t have any reasonably modern e-Procurement applications, expecting you can dive into more than a couple, learn them, and incorporate them in your daily processes in a short-time frame is completely unrealistic, so you shouldn’t buy from a suite vendor unless you can activate modules over time as you are ready for them)
  • the vendor offers, and publicly publishes, a complete Open API that, at a minimum, can be used to import and export all data the platform supports and should support the execution of core functions (so that you can script in a related module a date/time-based import/refresh process, re-execution of a core function/calculation, and retrieval of updated results)
  • the vendor offers the necessary quick-start services (you need to be able to get going quickly — if it requires a 3 to 6 month onboarding process, you’re dead in the water before you begin from both a first year ROI and adoption perspective)

But where do you end up? It depends. On what:

  • the module (Spend Analysis, Sourcing, Contract Management, Supplier Management, e-Procurement, e-Invoicing/AP, etc.)
  • the organization’s biggest need for workflow/process management
  • the organization’s biggest savings/cost avoidance/value creation opportunities

And for some modules, like e-Procurement, standard sourcing (no optimization/automation), AP (accounts payable), it’s quite hard to make the case for one over the other for an average organization (as it’s not how many features, functions, bells, and whistles, but which of those will actually add value to the organization acquiring the solution).

But for others, it’s crystal clear. And the clearest case is Supplier Management. Why? As per our recent article in our Source-to-Pay+ Series, Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP Mash, and there’s no way that a suite, which is typically only average across-the-board, is going to be deep enough for the key functionalities needed by an organization (and the majority only address SIM reasonably well, with limited SRM-related capabilities). In fact, you’re not even going to find a single BoB provider that provides leading functionality in more than a few areas of what supplier management can encompass (especially if an organization needs quality, enablement/innovation, orchestration, or other specific direct or service support requirements, etc.). (So do you think you’re finding a suite that does everything? Not a chance!)

So you can start with a suite (that serves as a foundation for comprehensive SIM), or even a module from a BoB provider (that likely provides baseline Supplier Information Management as a Sourcing/CLM/Analytics add-on), but if you are serious about improving supplier performance (quality, compliance, cost of service), you will eventually progress to one (or, for extensive, different, Supplier Management needs, multiple) BoB solutions.

Five Best Practices for Buyers (when searching for software solutions)

Building on our piece on five easy mistakes source to pay tech buyers can avoid, here’s a piece on five (5) best practices to get the buy right. We’re even throwing in a bonus practice since we dove deep into the critical sixth mistake most tech buyers make in source to pay (who need to realize that No Tech Should Be Forever).

#1 Understand your core pain points

Don’t buy based on hype, buy based on need. Any good salesperson can spin you a good yarn on how much that sourcing solution will save, how that SRM will get your suppliers in line, and how that tail-spend solution will prevent your spend from going into a tail-spin. But there’s no guarantees that any of those solutions will solve your current problems, which might require e-Procurement or Spend Analysis.

Review your source-to-pay processes and determine where your pain points are. Is it in quote collection or analysis? Adequate supplier discovery, identification, or certification? Contract negotiation, implementation, or obligation management? Purchase orders and approvals? Invoice verification and matching? Opportunity identification? Supplier proliferation? If you don’t know where the majority of time is being spent and how much of that time is fighting fires, doing unnecessary tactical work, or taking too long to do something that should be quick, then you’re letting someone else identify your problems, which might turnout to be problems relatively small in the grand scheme of things.

#2 Understand which pain points can be best alleviated with technology vs. those that can be best alleviated with process improvements.

Technology can’t solve all of your ills. (And it especially can’t solve all of your ills if it is based on Automated Idiocy. Remember, that’s what the “AI” they are selling you is.) It’s important that you understand what technology can and can’t do before you look for a solution. This will help you identify honest providers offering honest wares and vapourware vendors selling silicon snake oil.

Consider the above pain points. If it’s quote collection, a good RFP system will help. If it’s quote analysis, maybe, maybe not. It may be the complexity of the ask, and not the complexity of the process, that’s the problem. If it’s supplier discovery, you will likely need a discovery platform or a large supplier network; if it’s supplier identification, possibly just a better process of identifying which suppliers you’re already using who can solve a new problem for you. Supplier certification, that requires manual review and sometimes tech can’t help at all. When it comes to contract negotiation, while platforms can shuttle contract drafts back and forth, negotiation is between people. Implementation and obligation management, that’s the kicker, and more than what you can accomplish with just an electronic filing cabinet, which is what many “contract management” systems are. Purchase orders are as much a process problem as a technology problem, most AP systems can generate them. Approvals, process problem to identify it, but often a technology problem to ensure that the process is followed. Invoice verification — manual approval is required but m-way invoice matching can help with the process by identifying the corresponding purchase order, any payments made to date, any credits accrued to date, any approvals required, and so on. Opportunity identification? Well, all of the pain points you identified represent opportunities, but beyond that, you’ll likely need spend analysis. Supplier proliferation — that’s a process and management issue. All the SRM does is track the suppliers.

If you don’t understand what the pain points are that tech can actually solve, you’ll never select the right tech.

#3 Identify your top 3 pain points that can be addressed with technology and the corresponding source-to-pay module(s) you need to address those pain points.

Once you’ve identified the pain points, whittled down to the subset of pain points that can be best addressed by technology, and then identified the three (3) that will have the biggest impact if addressed, you can continue with your quest for tech.

#4 Compile an appropriate shortlist of vendors.

Once you know what you want to address with tech, and why, you can start the process of identifying an appropriate short-list of vendors. This is not just three to five vendor names given to you, or three to five vendor names that come up first in a Google search — it’s three to five vendors that are confirmed to offer a module that will address the same (sub)set of problems you are looking to address.

This is not three to five vendors that claim to offer the same technology, as many vendors will purposely use, and sometimes abuse, the same terminology in an effort to sell completely different products. For example, sourcing, procurement, and purchasing are sometimes used to mean the same thing by three vendors, and sometimes mean completely different things by three vendors. There are vendors that call their sourcing systems procurement, purchasing vendors which just offer catalogs, and so on. You have to research their offerings carefully to determine whether or not they truly offer a solution to what you are looking for.

#5 Determine what you need in a partner before you start evaluating vendors and the RFPs they submit.

You don’t just need a vendor that can provide technology, you need a vendor that can provide a solution and work with you, offering as little or as much as you need in the way of training, implementation, integration, and services. You need a venture that will match your culture, get along with your team and make sure you are successful with their product. You need to identify everything that makes a good vendor before you start the evaluation, otherwise you will grade just on the tech, and the tech is not enough. (It’s a necessary part of the solution, but not a sufficient part on its own.) All supply chain problems have a human element. Never forget that.

#6: Bonus Get help with the shortlist and the RFP.

If you’re not familiar with the technology, the vendors, or the terminology, it can be difficult to determine which vendors might actually be able to solve your problems and what vendors will just bamboozle you into thinking they can* when you send them the RFP. Get help from someone who is an expert in the technology, the vendors, and the true capabilities the vendors offer.

* Not necessarily on purpose; a misunderstanding caused by different usages of terminology (see point #4) can cause a vendor to believe they have the perfect solution for you.

Seven Easy Mistakes Source-to-Pay Tech Vendors Can Avoid

A few weeks ago we wrote about Five Easy Mistakes Source-to-Pay Tech Buyers Can Avoid in their effort to procure a fit-for-purpose technology solution to help them with their current challenges because the wrong solution can often be worse than having no solution at all.

However, and this is one thing the doctor knows very well, it’s not just buyers that make mistakes. Vendors do too. Lots of them. Lots more than they’ll care to admit, and these mistakes cost them time, money, sleep, and, sometimes, satisfied customers — which is ultimately the most important thing as satisfied customers will renew software subscriptions indefinitely (while unsatisfied customers will try to end the subscription as soon as possible).

Especially newer vendors, and especially those that haven’t built and/or run a company in our space before. And while some mistakes will be unavoidable (innovation doesn’t happen the first time, some things can only be learned the hard way, etc.), most aren’t. (In fact, the vast majority aren’t.) Usually all that is needed is research and insight, which can often be obtained by overworked founders without enough time by engaging the right advisor*.

So, to help these vendors understand overlooked areas where they are likely making mistakes, and where they should at least get an independent review, so that they can bring you better solutions, we’re bringing to them (and you, so you ask the right questions when considering their solution) the most common mistakes the doctor has seen over and over (and over) in his long career as an (independent) industry analyst, blogger, technical solution reviewer, consultant, researcher, CTO, etc.

Lack of market understanding and the real needs of their potential market

The first time the doctor talks to a new company, either for an introduction, review, or due diligence, one of the first things he hears (or will ask if he doesn’t), is why the founders started this company. And the answer he gets the most by far, so much so that he’s lost count of how many times he’s heard it and struggles to point to significant companies where he didn’t, is because XYZ didn’t do this function we needed to be efficient so we figured there was an opportunity. This would be a perfectly logical response if:

  • XYZ was a company/product that was designed to serve the function the founders were trying to address
  • there weren’t already two dozen products out there that addressed the function already and, at the baseline, did the same thing; literally, the same thing

This becomes especially prevalent during every M&A frenzy where a PE firm decides they need a company that does X, like (accounts) payable(s) during the last frenzy (exacerbated by COVID when PE firms realized/decided that business needed to be conducted entirely online, and decided they all need a virtual collaboration and online payment solution in their network). And the doctor doesn’t want to tell you how many times he heard payments company X was started because bill.com or quickbooks didn’t do basic accounts payable functionality or how few (read: almost none) didn’t do any real research which, in just a few hours, would have uncovered two dozen plus companies with payables capability the founders were sure didn’t exist, and the real opportunity was only in differentiation, specific country/regulatory support, or price-point (as there weren’t a lot of solutions at an affordable price point for smaller mid-size businesses until a few years ago). And even worse, many of these founders thought analysts and potential buyers should be super impressed that they essentially re-invented the software process wheel for a particular function for the twenty-forth time.

So, dear vendor, before you go to market, do your research (or contract someone who can do it properly for you)! And if you don’t understand your real value, contract an analyst that can identify it for you. The market is fickle, unforgiving, and easily swayed by a better presentation (even when from a competitor with lesser technology). Given that the knowledge and resources are out there, there’s no reason NOT to get it right.

Lack of competitive landscape knowledge and the real needs going unserved overall or at an affordable price-point for their target market

Building on our last point, it’s not just knowing what’s out there and what it does, but where your competition is strong and weak, what markets they are going after, what markets you should be going after based on your relative strengths and weaknesses, and what price point that market can easily afford and buy within a reasonable length sales cycle.

the doctor realizes this can be very time consuming, but this is where an implementation consultant or the right analyst can be extremely valuable, as they can quickly provide you with this information based on publicly available knowledge on currently released products based on demos and product reviews they have done, (feedback from) implementations they have been associated with, and (feedback from) integrations that they (or consultants they work with) needed to do, and buyers. A good analyst can do this without sharing any roadmap or non-public details on not-yet released capabilities, and should do that as roadmap and un-released capabilities might never be released, and is not something you should be basing your direction on.

Not knowing your true capitalization needs pre-profitability

While we should applaud companies that can bootstrap, and provide a standing ovation to companies that can raise angel / VC capital early to accelerate development, we should ONLY do so if they make an effort to understand their true cost of development, how long it’s really going to take to make that first sale, how long after that until they will make enough sales to support the minimum headcount they will need to sell and support those customers, and how much cash it’s going to take to get them there and raise it, or at least pre-negotiate follow on raises/loans to get there after the first investment.

Too many good companies fail because

  • they don’t take the time to estimate the true cost
  • they do, but don’t stick to their guns and when the investors say “final offer” at 70% of the estimated amount, they say “we’ll make it work”

And they try. They make a valiant effort. And as money dwindles, they put in 80 hour work weeks, developing more, faster. They amp-up cold-calling, content generation, reach outs, etc. They make their most heroic efforts. But all for naught. You can rush development, but you can’t rush a sales cycle. People need to realize they need a solution, do their research, qualify you, get a budget, go out to RFP, follow an archaic corporate process, and, then, hopefully, they can buy your product. If you’re lucky, you’re entering the process after they get the budget, but then you are fighting against a favoured “incumbent” that they plan to buy from (once they eliminate you), but usually it’s before, which means, on average, you are waiting six months for them to get a budget in the next cycle. If you’re a few months away from closing the doors, that doesn’t help you.

So if you can’t get what you need, don’t start. We all know entrepreneurship sounds great. We all know it’s a great experience to have on your resume. But it’s stupid to start something you know has no chance of succeeding. After all, there’s always another opportunity out there where you stand a chance of success. (And that’s it, even if you have enough in a typical case scenario, pandemics can happen, disasters can happen, markets can shift, or a better solution can be released halfway through your development by someone else that had the idea before you and is currently developing it in stealth mode with double your funding and a marketing budget out of the gate.) So, dear vendor, wait until have you a true chance. Otherwise, you’re wasting your contribution and letting down your early adopters when you close your doors (and that hurts us all when they lose faith in smaller companies and go back to ERP).

Overvaluing the tech (and AI)

A good tool is worth good money, and a great tool is worth great money. And if the great tool significantly increases efficiency, identifies meaningful cost avoidance, and delivers a 5X ROI, such a tool can be worth hundreds of thousands (or even millions of dollars if it is used by hundreds, or thousands, of users globally). But good and great is relative to what it does, how many people in the business it’s used by, the value it is delivering, and, ultimately, the budget the business class you are targeting can afford to pay based on the first three factors.

Tech for the sake of tech, while cool, has no value beyond being cool. Even if you have a lot of actual “AI” baked in (and let’s face it, if you do, the “AI” is only solving a very focussed, niche, problem), it’s still valueless unless it delivers value. It doesn’t matter how long you took to build it, how much it cost you (which can be a very poor measure because if you didn’t have a good team, overpaid that team, didn’t have the product or goal well designed when you started, p!ss3d hundreds of thousands away on Class A office space and big parties, it might have cost you tens of millions to build something a smarter, more focussed, cost conscious team could have built for two million), or how unique it is — in business, it needs value.

And before you try to sell it, you need to understand that value from a customer’s viewpoint, otherwise you’re going to have quite a challenge and customers who would otherwise jump on something fairly priced will not buy it even when it could be the best solution for them. (It’s not what the competition is selling it for, it’s what it should be sold for … one of the reasons too many Procurement departments don’t have modern tech is that they can’t get the budget for software priced using traditional enterprise software pricing that only the F500s/G3000s can afford.)

Undervaluing the tech (and AI)

Again, a good tool is worth good money and a great tool is worth great money when it delivers the right efficiency gains, cost avoidance, and value to a business that is losing a lot of money due to inefficiency and lack of insight.

Thus, you also have to be careful NOT to undervalue the tool or slash the price in an effort to get customers in the door quickly or sell to smaller organizations than you should be selling to, especially if the tech was expensive to build and no other organization could build it for less than 80% (or more) of what your organization invested into it and the cost of maintenance/continued development (due to advanced tech or unique capabilities or lots of integrations) is high. The reality is that once you set a price, that doesn’t become the floor, it becomes the ceiling, and if the price is not sustainable, you will go out of business and that will hurt not only you, but any early adopter that buys into you (and, again, that will hurt us all when they lose faith in smaller companies and go back to ERP).

Overestimating the DiY nature of the tech

Easy for you is not easy for a buyer. Remember, you’re the expert in the Tech — you built it, as well as an expert in the inefficiencies in the tech that came before — that’s why you built it, and an expert in the workflows that work well — that’s how you built it. You have the deep knowledge of the tech, the deep knowledge of the best practices, and the deep knowledge to know when a problem is best addressed by the tool, and when it’s not, and how out-of-the-box the support is, and how much has to be customized.

On the other hand, your potential client might be spending most of their time in Gmail and Excel, have never used the previous tool, and have no knowledge of current best practices. The customer may need training on the best practices, the workflows, and the tech, as well as a large reference library to remind themselves on how to use the tool if certain aspects of the process are not done very often (like once a month at most).

If services are needed, customers are not going to respond well to software only, or believe a low-cost when they know they will need the services. Understand the balance, present it appropriately, and sell it appropriately.

Misunderstanding the average customer capability & TQ

Building on the above, in addition to not overestimating the DiY nature of the tech, you should not misunderstand the average customer capability and the Technical Quotient of your target market. As we noted above, not all Procurement departments are advanced in the tech they have access to, and not all Procurement Professionals are adept with / used to modern tech. One has to remember that, for the longest time, Procurement was literally the island of misfit toys, and their understanding of technology and technology-enabled best practices was literally non-existent (as they typically didn’t use technology beyond the fax machine).

Even today, they may not be familiar with much more than basic consumer software for searching, e-reading, e-commerce, email, and gaming. Customized, deep, enterprise software may not be in their experience or repertoire.

Alternatively, if you are selling to a risk management or data analytics departments at big companies, they may have hired data scientists with deep training in mathematics and computer science used to not only using difficult mathematical (like Matlab and Octave) and analytics platforms (Qlik and Tableau), but building their own using open source analytics and data science platforms (like SciKit and Dataiku).

Know your audience and what they are capable of.

Failing to put the relationship first

In consumer software, it’s a transaction. But in enterprise software, it’s a relationship that you need to build, support, and adapt with. If the customer wants a transaction, they’ll use mass-market user-subscription based software or shareware. They’re going to you because they need services and support from a software provider that are experts in the technology and the process, can help them achieve their goals, and will keep the SaaS platform relevant.

* (HINT! HINT! STARTUPS/BEST-OF-BREEDS, STOP ASSUMING YOU KNOW IT ALL AND CAN DO IT ALL IN HOUSE! YOU CAN’T! YOU DON’T HAVE THE BUDGET FOR A FULL TIME EXPERT IN EVERY AREA. BUT YOU CAN OFTEN GET AWAY WITH PART TIME/SHORT TERM CONSULTING / ADVISORY. SO JUST DO IT!)

It Doesn’t Matter Where You Start, You End with BoB in Analytics!

In a recent article, we asked in the battle of Suite vs. BoB (Best-of-Breed), which do you choose, and ended up with the answer of neither, but potentially both, because, as indicated in our article we asked in our post on Where’s the Procurement Management Platform, you need a true platform (that enables the creation of a true source-to-pay plus ecosystem for the various workflows and processes that need to be managed).

As a result, we indicated you could start where you wanted, provided:

  • you could conceivably manage it,
  • the vendor offers, and publicly publishes, a complete Open API, and
  • the vendor offers the necessary quick-start services.

(And for even more details on each of these requirements, stay tuned for our upcoming article on how it doesn’t matter where you start, you end with BoB in SXM).

But where do you end up? For some Procurement Practitioners, it depends on:

  • the module,
  • the organization’s biggest need for workflow/process management, and
  • the organization’s biggest savings/cost avoidance/value creation opportunities.

(And again, we’ll have even more details in our upcoming article on how you end with BoB in SXM for more details.)

But for Analytics, like SXM, you will end at BoB for analytics as no suite equals the best in class (BiC) (spend) analytics solutions (even if they are built in BiC technologies for generic analytics like Qlik or Tableau) as the true BoB spend analysis solutions (which are fewer and further between than you would expect) are leagues beyond them.

Moreover, for Analytics, you should start with BiC, even if the suite has a pre-packaged solution that’s pretty good, enough to get going, more than your fledgeling analysts are likely to be able to handle in the first year, and appears to be offering the module cheap as an add on to everything else they are selling you. Why?

Lots and lots of reasons. Here are five to get you started:

  • Top X Opportunities: Suites will only show you your top 10 categories, top 10 suppliers, top unmanaged tail categories, etc. No guarantee that these primitive, canned, analysis will be YOUR biggest opportunities. BoB will come with hundreds of built-in analytics, considerably more customization capability, and the power to find opportunities that pre-built suites and dashboards will never give you.
  • Better Classification: Suites will do a decent classification, usually through their black box AI (trained on billions and trillions), but even if they get to 95%, it won’t be great, it won’t be manageable, and it won’t be customizable to your organization’s need. BoB, when it uses AI, will use it to create rules, that can be corrected and overridden, that you can customize to your specific taxonometric needs for optimized Procurement (and no standard industry classification is worth its weight in protactinium), usually starting with an out-of-the-box taxonomy customized to your industry using the vendor’s experience and community knowledge.
  • Better Analytics: many of these tools have a lot more capability in terms of report construction, dimension derivation, metric support, integrated data science, etc. etc. etc.
  • Better UX: while UX is completely subjective, and as per a (previous/upcoming) rant, is not something an analyst should be scoring and advising you on (as the best UX is the one that works best for you), in general, the probability is very high that you will find these BoB tools more customizeable in workflow and configuration, more logical in workflow, and much easier to use (if this wasn’t the case, no one would buy these tools and the vendors would have closed their [virtual] doors a long time ago)
  • Beyond Analytics: most BoB solutions will have integrated opportunity selection and project/savings tracking, performance/throughput/project metric support, and/or risk-based analytics. The value of analytics is continually overlooked because the “Savings” is identified in the sourcing event, captured in the contract, and realized in Procurement, and no one wants to acknowledge the opportunity would not even have been identified without analytics.

And, finally, why not get used to using a best-in-class tool from the get-go so you don’t have to relearn a new tool when you max out the capabilities of the suite solution and are ready for the next level? Especially when, as you get better and better at analytics and dive deeper and deeper into categories, you can improve the taxonometric mappings, track all the opportunities you identify (and your progress), do what-if analysis when the mood strikes, and get productive in a tool that will do [much, much] more for you in the long run?

So, while you might select a suite SIM module as a foundation for your supplier data store when you need to start centralizing supplier data somewhere for your sourcing projects and procurement buys (which is where your organization has determined it needs to start its S2P journey), when you’re ready for analytics, just go straight to BoB. (And if the C-Suite wants to see reports in the fancy suite, buy the basic reporting package and let them use the basic dashboards. And if the suite supports custom dashboards, then pump the appropriate analytics back in as reporting data. Get good with best-in-class analytics from the go with the best solution you can.)

Suite vs BoB. Which Do You Choose?

Neither!

But you need something. And there is no other option (yet). So are you doomed?

That depends. But first, let’s talk review the Primary Pros and Cons of each.

SUITE
BoB
PRO

  • one vendor relationship to manage
  • modular integration out of the box
  • consistent UX (or it’s not really a suite)
  • pre-implemented with major ERPs
  • the primary module offered by the vendor is truly Best in Class and considerably beyond the average suite capability
  • implementation is typically vendor supported, along with some integration services
  • low (subscription) cost out of the gate, pay as you need
  • today’s BoB comes with full, complete Open APIs to build your own ecosystem
CON

  • likely that only one or two modules are Best-of-Breed (BoB)
  • implementation and integration services are likely third party
  • high cost out of the gate
  • traditionally a closed ecosystem
  • multiple vendor relationships to manage
  • limited integrations out of the box to other modules you will need
  • inconsistent UX across the modules
  • limited to no ERP/MRP support in many modules

In other words, many of the weaknesses of the suites are the strengths of BoB and vice versa. But you want the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither, even though that doesn’t exist today as no vendor does everything well, nor can they because they would need to be experts in everything. (So unless a vendor hired all the experts, and became a monopoly [and we generally agree monopolies are bad], no vendor could even come close.) Even if a vendor did hire all the experts of today, and build everything out to the best of those experts’ capabilities, they’d soon become an unaffordable mega-suite (and then still not be best in breed in anything because once they built what the experts they hired envisioned, there would be a new generation of experts they still wouldn’t have employed with new, innovative, possibly revolutionary, ideas).

So what do you do? Well, the answer is, as we pointed out in our post that asked where’s the Procurement Management Platform, acquire a platform that is designed to support data-centric end-point integrations for specific processes and organizational needs as this will allow you to select the right module for each task, configure the right procurement workflows, integrate new, even previously unthought of, modules with the Open API, and even support intake and supply chain platform integration.

But, as we noted, there’s no platform. So, unfortunately, you have to assemble your own. But at least today you can. A decade ago there were no options to do this, so either you bought a suite, and lived with it, or you bought best of breed and did extensive work to glue them together in a grit, spit, & a whole lot of duct tape situation (that would take about 69 months).

But today, all of the new best of breed applications are being built from the ground up with complete Open APIs and the newer suites are also offering you APIs to easily get data in and out as well. (Not so much on the workflow configuration / function execution front, but that’s not necessary.) [But please note that an App Store or Marketplace is not an Open API, it’s a closed ecosystem limiting you in what third party add-ons you can select.]

So you can theoretically start with the right instance of a BoB or a Suite as your base and build out the right platform over time, depending on your needs today, and how fast you can digest a new module. If you already have one or more first generation modules, you have the understanding of what these modules do and how to use them and can likely digest new versions of those modules pretty quickly, so you could start with that many modules plus one. If you have no modern S2P modules, then, as we indicated many, many times in our very long Source-to-Pay series, you need to pick a module that represents your most immediate need, start with it, and start to grow your platform from it.