Back in May, the doctor indicated that at some point after Inspire he’d do a deep dive into the acquisition of Trade Extensions by Coupa. He waited as he wanted to think more on the possibilities and probabilities and get more insight into the potential, but as no additional insight appears to be coming in the short term, we’re going to summarize where things are at now, from the perspective of a SWOT analysis.
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Come back tomorrow where we discuss the opportunities and threats.
As of Thursday, one could look up a Form 8-K filing on the SEC site from May 3, 2017 that simply stated that Coupa had completed its acquisition of Trade Extensions, now called Coupa Advanced Sourcing for those of you on the ball (and watching TE profiles on LinkedIn for updates as well). SI expects you’ll see a formal press release early this week.
While SI completed its initial analysis shortly after announcement, it’s going to hold off publishing until after Coupa Inspire to see if Coupa inspiration changes the doctor‘s mind at Inspire. 🙂 # Look for a deep analysis the week of the 22nd.
(For speculators, you can check out SI’s historical writings on M&A in general and its posts on the importance of cultural conformity in partnerships and then balance these views with the simple fact that only one* acquisition of an optimization platform provider has succeeded in the Sourcing/Procurement space to date, and probably take a guess as to the doctor‘s current view. But it would be only a guess.)
*Tigris was swallowed by VerticalNet; CombineNet shrivelled in SciQuest, now Jaggaer; Mindflow was killed by Emptoris (which was in turn butchered by IBM, whose initial foray into optimization was so bad that they ended up giving it all away for free in COIN-OR) and the founders of Algorhythm subsumed their optimization capabilities into their rapid application development platform Applifire! Only the VerticalNet acquisition by BravoSolution was a success, and likely only because the BravoSolution model required keeping VerticalNet more-or-less in-tact as the US operation of the global BravoSolution organization (as there was essentially no US presence at the time).
#Or at least lets him focus in on one analysis in particular (as his analysis is actually a bifurcated analysis that depends on decisions and directions taken over the next year … will make for a very long blog series as is … )
Maybe some good is coming of all the gross incompetence in public sector spending, unreasonably long payment terms, and multi-nationalization of contemporary British companies … the last few years have seen more Analytics companies start in the UK than in the rest of the English speaking world. Anydata, founded in May, 2013, is one in the long list of UK-based spend analysis providers that have been receiving coverage here on SI and over on SM over the past year or so.
It’s one of the more unique offerings as, in some ways, it has more in common with Agiloft, a BPM (Business Process Management) vendor which recently forayed into Contract Management, building its first application in a matter of days using its visual development environment.
Like Agiloft, and unlike many other vendors in analytics, Anydata started out by building a visual development framework upon which it built its spend analysis offering. This gives it a number of advantages which include, but are not limited to, rapid configuration, rapid report and dashboard construction, rapid visualizations (that is on par or faster than Tableau, QlikView, PowerPivot, Birst, and other platforms they are typically compared against), and rapid development of workflows to support additional data collection.
The analysis platform is centered around powerful dashboard-driven analytics that can be customized by client from dozens of dashboard templates that include historic, strategic, geographic, vendor, company, office, cost-center, and chart-of-account overviews as well as savings opportunities, invoice opportunities, and category opportunities.
The categorization is quite powerful, and currently second only to Sievo in functionality currently on the market. Sievo’s unique multi-pivot drill-down approach allows users to classify data in chunks in any way they want to define those chunks in any order in a very collaborative fashion, which is currently unique on the market today. And while the AnyData approach is not as collaborative, it is as powerful as you can define chunks not on pivots and values, but on queries which can then be replayed, in the order of your choosing, as data is reloaded. So instead of having to define a three level breakdown to select a specific group of transactions for a category, it’s a simple query — which allows for much faster categorization if you are a power user good at creating SQL queries. Much faster.
And, rather uniquely, it has a very powerful data intelligence feature that allows an analyst to query and inspect the data and meta-data on a recently imported data source for the purposes of validating the accuracy and completeness — an activity that should go well beyond just validating the basic check-sums (against the annual financial reports). With AnyData’s platform, you can quickly identify sums, trends, and outliers for any time period of interest, use sliders to zone-in and zone-out on potentially anomalous data, use filters to restrict to dimensions (and even facts) of interest, and understand the characterization of the data you are importing. Not only does this help immensely in cleansing, but helps you pinpoint errors that standard techniques miss in cleansing and classification.
It has additional strengths, and, of course, weaknesses compared to other tools on the market — which can be explored in depth in the Spend Matters Pro series co-authored by the doctor and the prophet [membership required] (Part I) — but this should give you a good introduction to, and flavour for, what Anydata is.
Serex was founded 23 years ago to help clients select, implement, deploy and effectively use CRM and marketing automation systems, something it still does to this day. However, a few years ago, during a routine meeting, a client asked if it had any systems to support buying because while it had its CRM and order management under control, and working like a fine-tuned oiled machine (their words, not Serex or SI’s), it’s Procurement organization was unable to keep up, and it was having to hire more and more buyers on a regular basis. Serex’s first response was, appropriately, why not use a social media platform to collect bids, and more specifically use a reverse auction and let the suppliers come to it? The answer Serex got was not the answer they expected — the organization had tried over a dozen auction platforms and not a single one met its need. Not one. (Sounds surprising, but when you consider the limitations of first generation auction platforms, it’s really not. And when you consider that marketing from these first generation platforms dominate the marketing airwaves, it would not be a surprise if only first generation platforms were tested.)
So Serex said that if they really wanted a useable solution that worked, they would build one, under an appropriate agreement. First of all, the solution would be designed under the guidance of the CPO, who had a lot of cross-vertical industry experience at Global 3000 companies. Secondly, the buying team would engage in regular review sessions, assist in UI design, and begin to use the beta as soon as it was ready. Third, the company would commit up front to use, so that the system would be developed by buyers, for buyers, and be used from buyers day one. And while new, and basic in some respects, it is obviously an auction platform designed by buyers for buyers that is used by buyers and works. (Serex’s first customer saved over 6 Million in its first year. And since launch, its first few clients have achieved similar success to its first customer.)
But the real proof that the solution is useable, even it is still a point-based procurement solution, is that all of the ten plus companies it is in negotiations with following it’s inaugural ISM event are all Fortune 500 companies, many of which already have big sourcing and procurement implementations with auctions (like Ariba, Zycus, and Emptoris). This only goes to show that while the e-Auction market is crowded, there is always room for a useable solution that does exactly what a buyer needs it to do in an easy and obvious manner. So while the platform has miles to go, the miles it has crossed make it well suited for a certain market. Which market? For now, in SI’s view, the mid-size market with a need for an easy best-of-breed solution.
The platform is essentially an e-Auction solution built to enable buyers to quickly set up and run auctions through quick bidder search and selection, quick product search and selection, quicker selection of which suppliers can bid on which products, and default auction parameters (which can easily be overridden). Complete product specs can be defined or uploaded as attachments if needed. Suppliers can send detailed messages during the auction to request or offer alternate delivery dates or substitutions for quicker delivery, and a buyer can update the auction specs as needed. In addition, all auctions are saved and new auctions can be created as copies of old auctions, and then updated as needed, allowing repeat auctions to be setup in just minutes (which is valuable if a product sells better than expected and an auction needs to be repeated on short notice to meet demand). (The auction platform has a built in attachment viewer that displays standard web formats.)
The platform also has a product manager sub-component that allows a complete product database that can be maintained and uploaded into the auction platform using a standard flat file format with attachments. In addition, a complete bidder database can be uploaded and maintained into the auction platform with all relevant supplier information.
Serex is not an extensive e-Procurement platform, but it’s one that fledgling organizations need when they want to being their strategic sourcing journey.
For a much deeper dive, check out the doctor and the prophet‘s in-depth dive over on Spend Matters Pro [membership required]. (Part I, Part II, and Part III.)
When SI last did a deep dive on Ivalua back in late 2013, they were proving their mettle with source-to-settle (Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV) because an integrated Source-to-Settle (S2S) platform brings unparalleled benefits to Supply Management. Since then, they’ve been extending the platform, but instead of broadening it (as they already had just about everything covered except decision optimization and cashflow optimization), they’ve been deepening it with industry specific functionality for a plethora of verticals, namely, the manufacturing and automotive industry; the banking and services industry; the retail and distribution industry; the construction, oil, and gas industry; the health care industry; the telecom industry; GPOs (Group Purchasing Organizations), and the public sector.
For the machining and automotive industry, in addition to their powerful RFX capability which allows buyers to create detailed cost models for components and products being sourced, they also have integrated sourcing project management (as a Bill of Materials might require multiple sourcing projects, capabilities for New Product Introduction (NPI) management, asset and tooling management and tracking, and the ability to identify raw material / component price data variance across plant locations. This is in addition to the detailed supplier master data management (that can support the definition of approved suppliers by category, buyer, and location), quality tracking and management (through scorecards), and productive action plans (that build on the corrective action plan capability).
For the banking and services industry, in addition to vendor managed catalogs, contract compliance management, invoice data capture, and dynamic discounting, unlike some of their peers that grew up in the indirect (commodity) sourcing world, they support detailed rate cards and services profiles, e-Signature integration, and multi-envelope bidding.
For the construction, oil, and gas industry, in addition to support for spot-sourcing and spot-awards to on-contract suppliers, detailed service personnel data collection, and supplier data access to available assets (and tools), the platform also supports the creation of field service request estimates based on PR and PO process initiation, asset and tooling management, automatic monitoring of supplier credentials and certificates, data collection for supplier personnel performance management, and the collection of documents and specifications on all relevant supplier safety practices.
They’ve also fleshed out their analytics and out-of-the-box reports to cover spend data and metrics from all aspects of the source-to-settle lifecycle (which is easy to do when all of the data is in one store maintained by one platform, and not 3, 4, or 5 — which is common with some of their competitors that created their suites from multiple acquisitions), increased the configurabilty of their solution (where the buying organization not only has control over modules and workflow, but even what is displayed, or not, on individual screens), exposed the full extent of their integration capability within the platform (where lead buyers can configure the APIs through a simple form-based interface and XML), and created an add-on store where clients can share and download additional reports and components and integrations created by their peers or third parties.
Ivalua is still coding strong, and extending their platform year after year. It’s hard to say what will come next, as two-thirds of their road-map is always client-driven, but if you’re looking for a true, native, end-to-end source-to-pay platform from a responsive organization, the Ivalua platform is one that should be on your short-list.