Monthly Archives: May 2023

Source-to-Pay+ Is Extensive (P13) … But I Can’t Touch The Sacred Cows!

In our last installment (Part 12) of this series here on Sourcing Innovation (SI), we provided you a list of forty-plus (40+) vendors that could potentially meet your spend analysis needs and help you identify the cost savings, reduction, and avoidance opportunities you have in your organization as well as the best modules to achieve those cost savings, reduction, and avoidance opportunities. The right spend analysis tool properly applied will generate returns that are many orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the tool and will surprise you.

However, some of those best opportunities will be in the “sacred cows” of Marketing, Legal, and SaaS subscriptions. And you probably think you can’t do anything because you don’t have the data, Marketing and Legal won’t let you touch their spend (or give you the detail you need to even analyze it, often because they didn’t collect it), and you have no idea on what SaaS is actually being used and how much you overspend.

the doctor knows this, and knows that you might need custom solutions to manage, and analyze, this spend, so, before we move on and tackle the next module in the Source-to-Pay queue, we’re going to take a brief sidebar and provide you with short lists of vendors that specialize in each area that will collect the data you need — and sometimes even provide you with deep, customized, integrated analytics that provide you with the insights that matter (including the insights that matter on your matter spend) — to enable deep spend analysis, benchmark creation, and opportunity identification.

But first, we have to repeat our disclaimer that, as per the lists of e-Procurement vendors provided in Part 7 and the list of Spend Analysis vendors provided in Part 12, this list is most definitely in no way complete (as no analyst is aware of every company, and neither Marketing nor Legal are the particular domains of expertise of SI), is only valid as of the date of posting (as companies get acquired and go out of business, often without notice), and does not include the broader range of offerings that are available for SaaS Management (including provisioning and cloud management), Marketing (including agency management pure-plays, although DecideWare, for example, does this), or Legal (including contract authoring, management, and clause analysis — although we will cover some of these players when we get to Contract Lifecycle Management [CLM]).

Again, and we can’t say this enough, not all vendors are equal and we’d venture to say that this most definitely applies to the lists below. The companies below are of all sizes (very small to very large), offer different functionality (focussing in on different aspects of Marketing, Legal, and/or SaaS Spend Management), different levels of customization and integration, different types of companion services, focus on different company sizes and/or company types, and integrate with different Source-to-Pay and Enterprise ecosystems.

Do your research, and reach out to an expert for help if you need it in compiling a starting short list of relevant, comparable, vendors for your organization and its specific needs. For a few of these vendors, you may find a write up in the Sourcing Innovation archives, Spend Matters Pro, or Gartner cool vendor write-ups, but for many of these vendors, you’ll have to look beyond your typical sources of information as they are highly specialized and don’t fall into the typical Source-to-Pay bucket. But if you have enough Marketing, Legal, or SaaS spend, they can be highly valuable.

Note that, due to the newness of SaaS spend management, the different marketing and legal needs of every organization, and the high degree of differentiation between many of the solutions below, we are not (yet) defining baseline functionality and instead advising you to do a detailed analysis of your spend, processes, and needs and judge potential solutions based on that. If you need help with that, seek out a pro who can do the (gap) analysis and RFI creation for you.

Finally, a second reminder that inclusion on this list DOES NOT imply Sourcing Innovation is recommending the vendor.

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) Subscription Cost Management

Company LinkedIn
Employees		 HQ (State)
Country
Beamy 60 France
BetterCloud 305 New York, USA
Cledera 63 Colorado, USA
Flexera 1026 Illinois, USA
G2 Track 792 Illinois, USA
Hudled 8 Australia
NPI Financial 410 Georgia, USA
Productiv 139 California, USA
SaaSRooms 9 United Kingdom
SaaSTrax ?? North Carolina, USA
Sastrify 166 Germany
Setyl 14 United Kingdom
Spendflo 70 California, USA
Substly Sweden
Torii 114 New York, USA
Trelica 12 United Kingdom
TRG Screen 179 New York, USA
Tropic 240 New York, USA
Vendr 404 Massachusetts, USA
Viio 18 Columbia
Zluri 111 California, USA
Zylo 144 Indiana, USA

Legal Spend Management

Company LinkedIn
Employees		 HQ (State)
Country
Apperio 48 United Kingdom
Brightflag 150 New York, USA
(LexisNexis) CounselLink 28 Ohio, USA
Fulcrum GT 158 Illinois, USA
Mitratech TeamConnect 1119 Texas, USA
Onit 339 Texas, USA
Ontra 421 California, USA
Persuit 100 New York, USA
Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker ?? Ontario
Tonkean LegalWorks 76 California
Wolters Kluwer (TyMetrix 360) ??? Netherlands

Marketing (Procurement) Spend Management

Company LinkedIn
Employees		 HQ (State)
Country
DecideWare 27 Australia
HH Global ?? United Kingdom
Mtivity 15 United Kingdom
Promost 68 Poland
RightSpend 23 New York, USA
SourceIt Market 6 Australia

Onwards to Part 14.

Are You Effectively Using Your “Extended Enterprise”?

For many businesses, more than 50% of their workforce is employed by their suppliers. It is their suppliers who make and provide the crucial products and services upon which their own business depends. So, it makes sense to consider how they can best manage those suppliers as part of their ‘extended enterprise’.

Greater connection and collaboration with your extended enterprise can bring multiple benefits. Among them better access to specialised products or market knowledge; process efficiency improvements; a rise in innovation; reduced risk; improved quality control; boosted surety of supply; and additional flexibility.

The introduction to the 2023 Supplier Management Survey

How well do your run, or should I say orchestrate*, your supply base that constitutes your extended enterprise? Do you maximize their productivity? Capability? Innovation? Shouldn’t you know? Shouldn’t you find out?

The answer is, yes, you should be taking steps to better understand the capabilities of your supply base and use them to your advantage. The first step is to benchmark how well you are doing now. The best way to do this is with the State of Flux 15th annual 2023 Supplier Management Survey which will allow you to benchmark your organization’s maturity and performance against hundreds of your peers for free.

State of Flux is the global leading provider of supplier management research and benchmarks, as evidenced by the fact that this is their 15th year and they have been doing it longer than anyone else.

The survey is only open for a limited time, don’t miss your chance!

* keep reading the Source-to-Pay series!

Dear Vendor Rep, when you hear “We have trouble … ” You SHOULD NOT assume the individual wants you to sell them whatever your closest solution is. NEVER!

Another Friday. Another dozen topics to rant about. But one has to surface to the top, and this week, it’s the circulating documents and advice on LinkedIn on what a vendor sales rep should say when a potential customer says “X”. I don’t want to get to specific, and inadvertently call people out (although I may if I see a continued push for this nonsense), but needless to say, as this is a Friday, and another rant, the “advice” being given is entirely wrong and total BullSh!t! And I’m sick of it, and as a potential customer, you should be too.

As an example, and this is not necessarily a specific example, I’ve been seeing advice along the lines of:

If a potential customer says “we have trouble managing our inventory and/or raw materials”

Then a vendor rep should hear “our business could be stalled or halted if we don’t have what we need to satisfy our customer demand, produce our products, or run our production lines” and “therefore, I want inventory management, product tracking, and or storeroom/warehouse management software and I want it now“.

And then that vendor rep should identify their most appropriate software solution or platform and say “our Gruntmaster 6000 module is exactly what you are looking for as it tracks your inventory on-hand by quantity and location, as well as in process by lane and supplier, lets you assign it to builds and customers, and gives you an accurate picture of what you have on hand and when you will need to restock and even prompts to re-order” …

H3CK NO! ( Get lost, Phil. )

As another example, if a potential customer says “we are in immediate need of Procurement cost savings”

Then a vendor rep should hear “if we don’t get a cutting edge e-Sourcing or e-Procurement solution ASAP we are going to get fired so, please, find us one, no matter what it costs”

And then that vendor rep should identify their most appropriate software platform and say “our new Ovation Sourcing Suite, running on the new-and-improved Phantom operating system, is exactly what you need as it will save your organization at least 10% annually on your addressable spend, which we estimate to be 400M based on your current spend profile, so you can easily afford the low, low, annual license cost of 4M”

AGAIN, H3CK NO! (Phil, we’re warning you!)

In neither situation does the individual want a sale. They want a solution, but that’s not a sale, and not necessarily even a piece of software.

Specifically, they want to understand what their problem is, why they are having the problem, what processes could be changed to prevent the problem, and only then what a solution needs to be in order to help them (and they want to understand what they need before they are asked to judge a solution, and how valuable that solution really is). At least if they are an individual with independent thought who wants to remain that way. (the doctor does realize that there are apparently quite a few individuals [numbering in the thousands] who would rather just belong to a cult of savings and/or a cult of technology and that there is at least one predatory vendor out there that seeks these customers out and actively convinces them to repeat the “savings” mantra until they buy in and join the cult. But there are still quite a few individuals who may eventually want your technology who abhor cults and want to retain their individuality.)

Thus, when a customer says “we are in immediate need of Procurement cost savings”

What you should say is “we need to do something or our jobs are on the line, but we don’t know what and we need some guidance”

And before you give them a single word of guidance, you should ask, not say, ask “why, what’s your reasoning, and where do you think that savings could come from“.

If the reason is “the boss said if we don’t cut the costs he’ll cut our jobs“,

then you should say “okay, so your boss thinks you are overspending — that may or may not be the case in the current economic and supply chain environment; the first thing you should do is a category-based spend analysis against market benchmarks to identify where your spending is, and whether any savings is likely in each category with significant spend; then, based upon any identified opportunities, you need to determine the best way to capture those savings which could be renegotiating with contracted suppliers (in exchange for a longer term), putting spot-buy suppliers under contracts, or going to market with a (multi-round) RFP”

and only then should you say, “now, if you would like us to help, we offer a spend analysis tool if you can do the analysis yourself and/or [guided] spend analysis services and/or we partner with consultancy CCA who can help you with the analysis; then, if you determine that you need RFP technology, we have an advanced sourcing product that could be a perfect fit, and if you determine (re-)negotations are the big problem, we also have a contract management solution/integration with negotiation support that many of your peers have said works great in those situations; we’ll reach back out in x weeks, which is about how long the initial analysis should take, but if you get answers sooner we’re here to help”

Not only will the potential customer respect you, but you will be their first callback as soon as they know what they need, and if they can skip an open RFP process in their technology selection, it’s likely you will be their first choice because they want a vendor who will listen to them, understand their problems, help them identify the root cause and the necessary processes changes and improvement, and ensure that any solution they buy is one that’s actually appropriate to their situation and one they can use. And this will be true even if your solution costs more because they are looking first and foremost for a vendor that will help them achieve the promised ROI, not just promise them one (or insist they drink the kool-aid). (Please don’t sip the Kool Aid.)

The situation for the inventory example is similar. Almost every manufacturer has an MRP, and knows what they are buying/using, so it’s likely their inventory issue is a process issue, possibly exacerbated by a lack of integration between systems, or a lack of visibility into forthcoming production plans. Similarly, every organization knows what they buy, it’s on the PO, and they know what is shipped, it’s on the ASN, and if they have a no-receipt, no-pay policy, they know they should have received what was in the ASN. But chances are there is no counting, or ASN override, when receipt is verbally acknowledged (and a buyer keys in a single “Y” when the warehouse clerk says “yeah, we got it“), no connection between the procurement system and the inventory system, no identification of where the product is stored, and no indication of whom the product was intended for.

In other-words, they probably don’t need an inventory system, they probably need an integration solution/module that connects the systems, consulting on best practices to help them get the processes right, and auxiliary modules for sales tracking or integration into sales so the inventory is properly allocated.

They may still need your solutions, but they need your knowledge first, and if you offer the right services, possibly need your consulting, more.

Remember this before you take that bad advice to lay right into an inappropriate sales pitch. At least if you want them to want you. (They don’t want a Cheap Trick anymore.)

Source-to-Pay+ Is Extensive (P12) … Here are Some Spend Analysis Vendors

As promised in our last installment (Part 11), where we outlined the baseline capabilities that are needed for a solution to qualify as a modern spend analysis solution, here are some vendors that you can consider that meet most of the requirements. Note that, where spend analysis is concerned, some companies actually use two solutions, one as part of the platform ecosystem that they use that serves as the centralized master data store for spend analysis with the central “cube” and pre-configured reports for management, and a standalone best-of-breed powerhouse tool for free-form what-if analytics, where the power analysts can slice, dice, and reconfigure the data as they wish without impacting anyone else in the organization. Thus, it’s okay to choose two different, complementary, solutions if that meets your needs better than one (or keeps your users happy and using a system vs. trying to bypass it).

Note that, as with the list of e-Procurement Vendors we provided in Part 7, this list is in no-way complete (as no analyst is aware of every company), is only valid as of the date of posting (as companies sometimes go out of business and acquisitions happen all of the time in our space), and does not include generic business intelligence or analytic applications offered by providers without any specialization in spend analysis. (Nor does it include vendors that are only focussed on one vertical. While a couple of vendors below have a primary vertical, our understanding is that they can support other, related, verticals and have some generic elements of spend analysis.)

Also note that, and we want to be very clear here, not all vendors are equal, and we’d venture to say that NONE of the following are equal. The companies listed below are of all sizes (very small to very large, relative to vendor sizes in our space), cover the baselines differently (in terms of percentage of features offered, how deep those features are, how integrated analytics is [or can be] with other modules, and how customized the solution can be for an organization or the vertical in which it plays), offer different additional features, have different types of service offerings (backed up by different expertise), focus on different company sizes, and focus on different ecosystems (such as plugging into other platforms/ecosystems, serving as the Source-to-Pay master data repository or controller, offering a plug-and-play model for a larger, or different, ecosystem) etc.

Do your research, and reach out to an expert for help if you need it in compiling a starting short list of relevant, comparable, vendors for your organization and its specific needs. For many of these vendors, good starting points might be found in the Sourcing Innovation archives, Spend Matters Pro, and Gartner Cool Vendor write-ups if any of these sources has a write-up on the vendor.

And, again, note that if we say Source-to-Pay, it means that the vendor offers modules that also cover baseline capability across most of Sourcing, Supplier/Vendor Management, Contract Management, e-Procurement, and/or e-Invoicing/Accounts Payable/Invoice-to-Pay. As to whether or not SI would consider those modules as meeting the majority of baseline functional requirements, you will have to (wait for and) check the starting vendor lists in those areas.

Finally, a second reminder that inclusion on this list DOES NOT imply Sourcing Innovation is recommending the vendor.

Company LinkedIn Employees HQ (State) Country Other Offerings/Notes
Alteryx 3065 California, USA
Analytics8 SpendView 213 Illinois, USA
Anaplan 2395 California, USA Finance, Sales & Marketing, HR, Supply Chain
AnyData Solutions 10 United Kingdom Supplier Management, Contract Management
Corcentric Platform 587 New Jersey, USA Source-to-Pay, Payments
Coupa 3666 California, USA Source-to-Pay, Treasury, Contingent Workforce, Supply Chain Planning
Delicious Data 27 Germany
ElectrifAI 132 New Jersey, USA Contract Analytics, Supply Chain Analytics
Everstream 165 California, USA Supplier Risk
GEP 4640 New Jersey, USA Source-to-Pay, Supply Chain
Ignite Procurement 60 Sweden Contract Management, Supplier Management
intelflow 7 Germany Procurement Intelligence
Ivalua 848 California, USA Source-to-Pay, Direct Materials
Jaggaer ONE 1263 North Carolina, USA Source-to-Pay, Inventory Management, Supplier Network, Direct Materials
kiresult 5 Germany
LevaData 58 California, USA Direct Materials
McKinsey (Orpheus) 15 Germany
Metric Insights 18 California, USA
Neqo 8 France
Onventis (Spendency) 139 Germany Source-to-Pay, Direct Materials
Oversight Systems 145 Georgia, USA Payment Monitoring
PRGX 1421 Georgia, USA M&A Analytics, Retail Analytics, Audits
RightSpend 23 New York, USA Marketing Procurement
Pro(a)Act 5 Sweden
Robobai 50 Australia Sustainability, Risk, Treasury
Rosslyn 65 United Kingdom
SAP Ariba 84 California, USA Source-to-Pay, Supplier Network
Scalue 6 Germany
ScanMarket (Unit4) 60 Denmark Sourcing, Supplier Management, Contract Management
Sourcing Insights 9 Indiana, USA Contract Management, Risk Management
SpendBoss 3 North Carolina, USA
Sievo 303 Finland Project Management
Silvon 18 Illinois, USA
Simfoni 260 California, USA eSourcing, Tail Spend Management
Spendata ?? Massachusetts, USA
SpendKey ?? United Kingdom
SpendHQ 76 Georgia, USA Procurement Performance Management
SpendWorx 7 California, USA Market Intelligence
Suplari 10 Washington, USA
Tamr 169 Massachusetts, USA Healthcare
The Smart Cube 1004 United Kingdom Services
Xelix United Kingdom Payment Monitoring

Onwards to Part 13!

Source-to-Pay+ Is Extensive (P11) … What Do You Need For (A) Spend Analysis (Baseline), Installment 2

In our last post (Part 10), after reviewing the spend analysis process which, in short is:

  • Extract the relevant data
  • Load the data into the solution (mapping it to a starting taxonomy)
  • Structure for the types of analyses you need to perform
  • Analyze the data and get useful insights to
  • Act on the insights you get

We identified that the core requirements a spend analysis system needs to support are those that enable:

  • Load
  • Structure
  • Analyze

with a focus on

  • Efficiency

Let’s take these requirements one by one.

Load: The first step is to get the data in. It needs to be easy to ingest large data files and map the data to a starting taxonomy that can be manipulated for the purposes of analysis. Particularly, those data files in classic csv, row, or column formats that are universal. The ingestion needs to be fast and intelligent and learn from everything the user does so that the next time the application sees a similar record, it knows what to do with that record. This allows us to identify our first two core requirements:

  • rules: the application needs to support rules that allow for deterministic based (re)mappings when certain data values (within a tolerance) are identified (and these rules need to be easily editable over time as needed)
  • hybrid AI: that can analyze the data and suggest the rules for the user to select to speed up rule definition and mapping during load

Structure: The next step is to structure the data for analysis. In spend analysis, the core structure is a

  • Cube: the application must be able to build a custom cube for each type of analyses required; one size, and thus one cube, does NOT fit all; the cubes must also support derived dimensions using measures and summaries

Sometimes the cube needs to be explored, which means that the application also needs to support

  • Drill Down: to the data of interest
  • Filters: to define the relevant data subset
  • Views: that can be configured and customized using measures, drill downs, and filters for easy exploration and easy revisiting

Also, while the theory is that you have one record in your ERP, AP, etc. for a supplier, product, and other real-world entity, the reality is that you have multiple (multiple [multiple]) entries, so the application has to also support

  • Familying of like entites: suppliers, products, and even locations
  • Mapping of children organizations to their parent when you can cut master contracts / agreements (such as with hotel chains)

At this point, we’ve built a cube, and we’re ready for:

Analysis: where we analyze our slices of the data to get insight that we can eventually act on; this requires:

  • Measures: that can summarize the data in a meaningful way
  • Benchmarks: that can be compared against
  • Reports: which can be bookmarked views that show the right summary (and can be saved or printed)
  • Data Science Hooks: to external algorithms and libraries for forecast generation, trend analysis, etc.

And at this point, while we don’t necessarily have everything the doctor would want in a modern spend analysis system, we almost have everything that is needed to meet the baseline, with one exception, and that’s the functionality needed to enable

Efficiency which, in spend analysis, equates to the technical requirements that eliminate the need to “reinvent the wheel” every time the analysis effort needs to be repeated. The problem with traditional spend analysis systems is that any time the data changes, all of the work has to be repeated. A good system will remember everything that was done, preserve it, just identify the data changes and new data, and pull them in. Some systems do this okay, but if the underlying data source changes, they fall apart.

However, when there’s more than one user, which is the case in most organizations, the implementation creates a central, “master”, cube and everyone has to work off of that. Usually this involves creating a copy of that cube, and then working off of that central cube. And then, when that cube is updated, create a copy of that cube and start all over.

Better systems will allow the user to pull in “just the new data” if the structure of the core cube hasn’t changed and the data can be mapped by the existing rules. But any time the base cube undergoes even a minor structural change, all of the analysts have to start again, from scratch. But this is mitigated if the system supports

  • Inheritance: which creates every user’s cube as a sub-cube of another system cube or the master cube and, when any parent cube changes, use the relationship to automatically propagate any changes without any effort required on the part of the user

There are, of course, other features and functions that can be added to increase efficiency even more, but this one capability makes a spend analysis system exponentially more efficient than any system that came before.

We should note that, as of today, only one spend analysis system supports full inheritance, but a couple support partial inheritance and are attempting to improve their offering. So keep this in mind when you are comparing solutions, as not all will be equal.

Continue to Part 12.