Category Archives: Marketplaces

Everyone In the Procurement Ecosystem Exists For a Reason — But Do You Know Why …

… and more importantly, when you should use them?

Joël Collin-Demers recently commented on a LinkedIn post that

Everyone in the ecosystem exists for a reason. Big consulting and analyst firms are great tools for organizations in particular contexts (e.g. a big firm is a great way to get a lot of smart people deployed on a problem quickly).

The point I’m trying to make is that we tend to over-rely on big consulting and analysts.

And he was correct. Big X consultancies, niche consultancies, implementors/integrators, analyst firms, suite vendors, best of breed vendors, etc. were all started for a reason and continue to exist for a reason. Understanding both of these helps you determine when you should use them, why, and what you should (and should not) expect. In this post on where we asked If You Really Want Success … or Just Say You Do, we made it abundantly clear that Analyst Firms, Big X, Implementors, and even Vendors (beyond a certain point) ultimately don’t care about your success because

Analyst Firms make money pushing the solutions of the vendors that pay them the most, not on making sure those solutions solve your problems. While there was a time you could always count on the best unbiased advice from an analyst firm, that was long ago. Ever since the first big vendor realized it was faster (and cheaper) to buy influence by sponsoring reports or cutting big research access POs, the end of unbiased recommendations began. (And it’s more your fault than the vendor’s because you came to expect free reports, but no one can work for free, which means the vendors had to pick up the entire cost, which means those reports say what the vendors sponsoring them want said, not what you need to hear.)

Big X need to keep their benches employed addressing your problems, and if a vendor’s solution took care of everything, what else would they do? This doesn’t mean they are going to screw you, but it does mean they are only going to address what you ask them to, that they are going to try to do it with a diamond/platinum/sycophant partner to keep their top-tier consultancy status, and assign the weakest resources they think they can get away with to keep their top tier resources free to top paying clients. Moreover, as we discussed in our article on When Should You Use Big X, the vast majority of Big X did not start out as IT consultancies or Procurement Tech shops and this is still their weakest area (as the “wild west” tech players and boutique consultancies get the majority of best talent), so even if they are doing their best, it’s only so good. (Compared to their core strengths, which, as we said in the latter post, you’d be foolish NOT to take advantage of.) The reality is, many Big X are now mostly body shops who have to keep those junior consultants employed while keeping their big software partners happy. And that’s a difficult balancing act, especially considering their overheads and the luxurious lifestyle these partners have grown accustomed to.

Implementors make money implementing solutions — if that solution solved everything for the next five to ten years, how would they keep their bench employed as well. Now, they are going to make sure it’s implemented to the best of their ability, but since they weren’t hired as a consultancy, they aren’t going to be the ones to tell you when a solution is not the best for a certain task — they are going to do what they are paid to do (so that, when you realize you need another solution in a year and then use the same Big X again to recommend it, they get that contract too).

Vendors need to keep their investors happy, which means securing sales as fast as possible, not ensuring they are the perfect fit and/or outlining where they will fall short. Now, of everyone in the ecosystem, they definitely want you to succeed, but the reality is, they can only spend so much time on you because they took too much money from investors at too high a multiple, aren’t growing at the expected rate, and the management and sales team risk being fired (and the entire company being shut down) if they don’t continually increase the rate they bring on new customers (whether they can reasonably support them or not). It’s all about “what their solution can do for you” and not about “is their solution right for you”.

And so on.

Niche Consultancies are the best IF they do not have preferred vendor partnerships (which require a certain level of business to maintain) as they know they have to perform to get their next contract, but these are few and far between. And even though it is critically important, almost no one does Project Assurance for their ProcureTech project (and then wonders why we have had Two and a Half Decades of Project Failure).

Short story, everyone in the ecosystem exists to make money off of YOU. While that’s not a bad thing IF they provide value (and heck, I’ll happily give you a dollar if I am guaranteed two dollars in return in a reasonable time frame), not all of them do … and those that do are not equal in the value they provide (primarily due to conflicting pressures, not intent). Until you understand that, your returns will be limited.

The important thing to remember is that if you’re just starting your best-in-class Procurement journey, you typically don’t need an end to end suite, and if you’re Procurement maturity is still elementary school, you don’t need a 7-figure mega suite when a low 6-figure mini suite, which can be implemented in 1/4 to 1/6 the time, can get you 80% of potential savings. Especially when this level of savings will take you 3-6 years to realize. Then, when you’re ready (and know how to get the additional ROI the mega-suite can provide), you can upgrade to the seven figure mega-suite in confidence you’ll achieve the same level of ROI. (Instead of being the next ProcureTech disaster. And while you may believe in a beautiful disaster, there is no such thing where tech is involved.)

Think you can’t afford modern S2P as a SME? Think Again and Auxionize!

Auxionize is a very interesting new source-to-pay marketplace, with optional managed services, for the SME and MM indirect and off-the-shelf direct sourcing/procurement organization that gives buyers the 80% of what they need in a Source-to-Pay platform at a fraction of the cost of a larger mid-market/suite offering. (Small organizations (up to 5 buyers, only a few auctions a month) that might think they can’t afford a modern sourcing tool can start with an ultra-basic plan that starts at 600 Euro a year and MM organizations can get a decent sized solutions with the core modules starting at 2,500 Euro a year (and an all inclusive unlimited use solution for 1,000 Euro to 2,000 Euro a month, fitting it on their P-card). (And for twice that, they can get a fair bit of managed services to augment their team and significantly increase their sourcing throughput. And if they are a MM with a 8K to 10K monthly budget, full platform with more-or-less unlimited use and unlimited services for an average mid-sized organization’s needs.)

Auxionize, which is based in Sofia, Bulgaria where it was founded over a decade ago and where it launched its modern S2P-powered marketplace about 5 years ago, takes advantage of being a low-cost locale with a relatively high level of education, as it is in the EU, and its costs are half that of most major US or EU locales. Moreover, since its platform is designed for high efficiency throughput, it can keep its service costs low and service levels high and provide SMEs and MMs what they need (and the majority of what they want) at a price point they can afford. (Moreover, their sales organization is now US-led, so North American companies can work on their timezone.)

In order to discuss Auxionize, we have to unpack that first sentence. When we do, we see it has four primary offerings:

  • product catalogue (that powers the)
  • marketplace
  • source-to-pay
  • managed services

Product Catalogue

The Auxionize platform is built on a detailed product catalogue that provides very detailed descriptions for standard products and parts (which is why it’s also a good direct sourcing platform for off-the-shelf manufacturing as you can specify complete part details that are precise enough for standard manufacturing). They have a very detailed taxonomy that is built on top of the Product Information Management (PIM) of icecat that they use to organize standard products defined in the icecat PIM as well as custom products defined by buyers on the platform (which can be public or private, and will be public if supplier defined and may be public if buyer defined). For every product, you can define its features, materials, weight and dimensions, and other standard information specific to its category. Even for a screw their default profile is material, thread type, head shape, length, manufacturing standard, surface finish, diameter, grading, etc. For stationary, they will capture the weight, thickness, opacity, strength, brightness, tear resistance, tone, finish, etc. will all be captured — as will the expected packaging (size). And so on. (And if they don’t have a template, you can copy the closest one and add what you need to specify your product or part — and, as a result, can specify any part you need for indirect or off-the-shelf direct sourcing and procurement.)

The catalogue currently has over 250,000 parts, so if what you want is a standard part or product, it’s probably already in the system and very quick for you to get going on a sourcing event.

Marketplace

Auxionize started out as a marketplace before it realized that a marketplace wasn’t the right solution for sourcing and strategic procurement, but realizes it is still a valuable solution for companies just needing to do spot buys or identify suppliers to invite to a sourcing event. As a result, it’s a traditional marketplace that is free for sellers and free for buyers to search, but they need to be a (paying) customer to run an event (and make a purchase, which can be a sole-source RFX for a spot-buy).

All a supplier rep has to do is sign up, create a company profile, wait for it to be verified (in the appropriate commercial register), and then create their catalog (which can be uploaded from csv files that use the template format that can be downloaded). If the suppliers need help, Auxionize has premium plans and pay-as-you-go managed services. Their products are then in a public marketplace that all buyers can search. (And, to be clear, a company can be both a buyer and a supplier on the platform, although most sellers are not yet buyers [as with any marketplace].)

Source to Pay

The platform supports standard e-Auctions and RFX (that they call pre-auction) for sourcing, award generation (which can be used to automatically generate the meta-data for the contract once it is uploaded into the system — note that the Auxionize platform does not support negotiation, and only provides a contract repository where you can associate orders, attach related documents, find associated orders and their associated invoices], and manage alerts and notifications around milestones, renewals and expiry), order creation and management, and invoice acceptance and management (as the system ends at ok-to-pay). It also provides suppliers with a portal where they can access the sourcing events they are invited to, see their orders, and upload their invoices over a secure channel.

(Pre) Auction

The core of the platform is the (pre) auction platform that the buyer uses to set up a sourcing event and that walks the users through the seven necessary steps (and doesn’t let the user publish the RFX [pre-auction] or auction until it is complete and issue free. But before we can discuss the seven step setup process, we need to discuss IPS — Integrated Product Specification.

Integrated Product Specification

Sourcing events in the Auxionize system are for complete product specifications, which consists of a (marketplace) product catalog item the buyer wants to obtain along with all of the additional specifications necessary to source that item. This will include a buyer product specification — which wraps the standard catalog item as a buyer item with internal identifiers, documents, drawings, specifications for environmental or regulatory compliance, and any additional non-standard specification — and the purchasing specifications (quantity required, unit, minimum order quantity, warranty requirements, currency, delivery location, payment terms, etc.) as well as (internal) purchasing strategy information. At this point, general terms and conditions, drawings and specifications, and general notes can also be associated with the item.

Auction Setup

Once the buyer has created one or more internal product specifications, the buyer can create a (pre)-auction following the seven step formula built-in to the Auxionize platform:

  1. Users: define the users who will have (read) only access to the sourcing event (once published)
  2. IPS: select the items, defined by IPS, that will be sourced; they can be grouped together (into sheets) if desired
  3. Type: RFX (Pre-Auction) or (Reverse) Auction
  4. Rules: the auction configuration / settings including, but not limited to, access (open, controlled, closed); award rules (product, group, all); visibility (sellers, products, prices); extension period and max offers in that period; etc.
  5. Access Control: which suppliers, and which of their representatives, have access
  6. Documents: upload any (additional) documents required to specify the sourcing event, terms and conditions, etc.
  7. Notes: add any final notes and instructions for the sellers

Once each step has been completed, with minimal, acceptable, definitions, then the event can be published and sellers can start bidding. Once the ending time, with any extensions, has been reached, the buyer can see the bids (side by side) as well as the (default) awards as per the award rules they defined in the setup (but which are hidden from the sellers). They can accept the default allocations and generate an award (which can be output for contract negotiations and which can be used to auto-index a contract, once signed and uploaded, with meta-data once it is associated with a previous sourcing event).

Note that once the auction is live, the sellers have access to a public forum to ask questions and get answers, as well as a private channel to send and receive private messages.

Order and Invoice Management

Once a sourcing event has been completed, the buyer can create one or more orders against it and send the order to the selected seller(s) — and continue to do so over time. The order is pushed into the supplier portal and sent to the supplier in an email. Once the seller has shipped the order, they can upload the inovice to the buyer direct to the system (and if they have the original order email, they can click the provided link to go right to the upload screen). (Unlike some competitors, they don’t allow email submissions because they detected multiple man-in-the-middle attacks in the past.)

If desired, Auxionize can be integrated with the ERP (in a custom project) and push orders direct to the ERP.

Odds and Ends

Supplier profiles right now are limited to basic company profiles, and if the supplier a buyer wants isn’t in the system, they can invite the supplier with a simple email.

In the next version, if the buyer negotiates a contract for something that wasn’t sourced through the system, the platform will use AI to automatically extract all identifiable metadata it has confidence in, negating the need for the buyer to manually enter all of the metadata (and instead just override any metadata that wasn’t identified to the buyer’s liking). In the current version, if the contract isn’t associated with a sourcing event, the buyer has to enter all of the metadata manually to store the contract.

The platform also computes the projected savings from each award based on the current average market price and tracks the contribution from each project, buyer, and department over time.

Once a buyer has done business with a seller, the buyer can leave a simple rating on a 5-star scale that contributes to a public supplier average that can help all buyers select trustworthy, reliable sellers in the marketplace.

Managed Services

Finally, Auxionize offers managed services that will help the buyer create their ISPs, create and run their auctions, negotiate their contracts, upload and index them, create the orders, and see whether or not a supplier has accessed the order or responded. These services start as low as 1,000 Euro a month for a buyer that runs 5 auctions or less, on a limited number of ISPs, in the EU timezone. Most smaller mid sized clients can get all the managed services they need for about 5K Euro a month (as most still only run a handful of events for a small team of users), or the cost of 1 FTE.

All-in-all, Auxionize is a fairly extensive mid-market offering at a great price point for small and smaller mid-sized organizations that might think a modern, foundational, source-to-pay platform is out of their grasp (and services a pipe-dream).

Need Some New Equipment? Then You Better Get that Financing APPROVEd!

Ten years ago, SI was one of the first sites to cover KWIPPED, which was one of the first, and now likely the oldest (and biggest), marketplace for equipment rental procurement for all your equipment rental needs. Launched to help businesses with idle equipment and equipment rental agencies connect with businesses that needed to rent equipment for the short to long term, it served a niche in complex and project procurement that the major procurement platforms weren’t (and still aren’t) solving.

It works well, and worked well since day one as it grew quite fast, and while it met a lot of the market needs, it didn’t solve all of the market problems that were out there in equipment procurement for precise/complex projects and one-time acquisitions. Namely:

  • Some buyers wanted to rent to own, but suppliers weren’t (or couldn’t afford to be) offering that
  • Some buyers wanted to lease, or lease to own, for long periods of time, but needed up front financing (which suppliers couldn’t afford)
  • Some suppliers wanted to help buyers get financing, but they could only recommend a few lenders, who were often:
    • too strict in their lending criteria
    • too costly with their rates
    • too slow, and buyers walked away
  • Some suppliers didn’t like the loss of visibility into, or control, of the sales process with current lending processes (send the buyer away to a third-party lender and hope she comes back)
  • Many lenders didn’t like random referrals they were unlikely to ever approve (which wasted their time), or the spray and pray tactics savvier buyers who knew how to find options would use (which wasted their time)

In other words, buyers and suppliers wanted financing options so they could lease to own (or even buy outright), but neither of them liked the current application and approval process, and lenders wanted an easier, more efficient way, to get requests relevant to their lending business, so they could waste less time in approvals and more on hitting their lending targets (because they need to lend to make money).

Being techies, the founders of KWIPPED, who started off by making introductions to potential lenders on behalf of suppliers they knew well and buyers who asked, realized there had to be a better way to solve this problem, because forcing buyers to go offline and deal with a lender through old-school fax and email just wasn’t a good experience for anyone. They realized that there should be a platform like Lendgo (that could obtain, and compare, personal mortgages and refinancing options side-by-side), but for business equipment financing and leasing, and, more importantly, one that meets the need of all three parties, not just the buyer or lender.

So that’s what they set out to do, and they do it through the APPROVE marketplace (which can be accessed through the KWIPPED platform, the seller’s website, or even a third-party marketplace through a plug-in).
In KWIPPED, or a supported supplier marketplace, when a buyer brings up a listing, they will see the buy-it-now price, the rental price, and the estimated financing price (per month) based on the equipment type and a predictive model based on a database of over 75,000 financing applications and 3+ responses to each (which allows them to predict, with high accuracy, the estimated financing for that item for a buyer with average or better credit rating).

To start a financing application, it’s a 60-second process for the buyer who just needs to fill in some basic details to kick the process off. At this point, the request will be routed to a supplier’s financing (assistance) department if they have one, or the APPROVE financing team who will contact the buyer for any specific information required to make a lending application, get clarity on their needs, augment the application with the right data in the right language to optimize clarity and success with the lenders, and then, when the application is ready, kick off the automatic application process in the system.

Unlike many of these marketplace financing/mortgage/insurance platforms, the APPROVE platform is not a spray-and-pray platform or one that relies on buyer expertise to build a short list of potential lenders to send the application to. Once all the information has been collected, they use a predictive (machine learning) model that has been trained on this data set of over 75,000 financing requests, over 300,0000 quotes, and third-party risk and financial data on the buyers and sellers to predict which vendors will approve the financing and what the rates will be, and then send it to the top 3 vendors with the lowest predicted rates and a high chance of approval. If one or more of these vendors denies, it will continue down the list of potential lenders (who are predicted to charge higher rates and/or have a lower chance of approval) until it gets 3 quotes for the buyer. And, if the financier on the APPROVE or seller team happens to know that a particular lender is more or less likely to approve a specific request based on experience, they can override the rankings and issue the request direct to the lender (but generally the platform works quite well and it’s best to let it work its predictive model).

This is a very important differentiation. You don’t want to send a financing request to just any lender because:

  • some very risk averse lenders will only approve the top top tier of buyers (the cream of the crop that could probably afford to buy outright), and you’re just wasting your time
  • some less risk averse lenders will lend to anyone, who want to pay exorbitant interest rates that are 2X to 3X prime (and should only be a last resort)
  • some lenders specialize in certain industries and equipment types, and don’t want to lend outside their domain of expertise
  • etc.

This means if you don’t target the financing applications properly, you are going to get a lot of lender rejections or a lot of bad offers that the buyer won’t accept, leading to a lot of wasted time on all parties (and platform mistrust). Through laser focussed targeting, buyers know they have a real shot of getting financing at a rate close to the predicted value, sellers know that buyers are serious if they follow through with the application, and lenders know that, if they want the business, they have (at least) a 33% chance of getting it. That gives these lenders better odds than banks offering a mortgage! Moreover, since APPROVE targets the quote requests, the odds that they will be willing to quote the application is 80% or more, compared to 50% at best for a random application. This means that APPROVE is at least 60% better for lenders than random seller referrals, making it worth the lender’s time to process buyer applications from the APPROVE platform much more quickly.

Moreover, unlike most of the market “lending” platforms out there, all parties have complete visibility into where the application is at all times.

The buyer can see when the financing request has been formally issued to the lenders, when a lender has returned a quote or rejected it, and then the 3 quotes side by side once 3 are received (and then select one to accept through the platform).

The lender has a view into the status of all of its open requests, as well as its request history, and all communications between it and either the APPROVE or supplier financing team (to collect any additional data it decides that it needs to issue a quote).

The lessor/seller can see where the process is at any time for each buyer that submitted a financing request, any communications that went back and forth between the APPROVE financing team and the lender (on the lessor/seller’s behalf), what quotes were returned, and when a buyer has accepted a quote and then begin the process on their end of completing the transaction without delay.

The APPROVE platform, especially when accessed through KWIPPED, a supplier web site, or third-party marketplace, makes the entire process of finding the right equipment, engaging with the supplier, getting the right financing, and closing the deal smooth, efficient, and relatively painless for all parties.

So while, like KWIPPED, this is NOT a typical sourcing or procurement platform that SI would normally cover, it is a very important platform nonetheless as most of your direct, indirect, and complex services sourcing platforms don’t enable the identification of rent-to-own or lease-to-own options when you need to temporarily (or permanently) acquire new equipment for a new construction, commissioning project, factory, or lab, and definitely don’t help you with financing when you can’t afford to, or don’t want to (because you have other, better, uses for your working capital now), pay for the equipment up-front. Like KWIPPED, APPROVE fills a very specific niche that is overlooked until it is desperately needed, and one that any organization that needs to rent or buy equipment, that just can’t be sourced or procured through normal S2P/P2P platforms, should know about.

BlueBean: Instant Coffee for Mid-Market “Tail”-Spend Procurement

Billing itself as a platform that lets you enjoy a consumer-like buying experience with enterprise-level controls on existing e-commerce websites, BlueBean is a new solution for easy, compliant, organizational Procurement that lets you control your budget and pay less right from your browser.

Billing itself as a “request-to-pay” solution, the goal of the BlueBean platform, and the founders, is to simplify end-user buying in an average mid-market organization in a Procurement-compliant way without the need for intake, orchestration, and/or a traditional tail-spend / expense management platform that expects an underlying e-Procurement platform when most of the spend in such an organization is driven by users (due to there only being a few categories where strategic procurement is worth while and/or an understaffed central Procurement department). Moreover, the goal is to deliver a completely browser-based SaaS solution that doesn’t require a buyer to learn a new platform to make a purchase from a vendor who has, or sells through, an existing on-line e-commerce site.

So what is BlueBean? For the end-user, it’s a consumer-like “coupon manager” app (implemented as a browser extension) that runs in the browser and allows them to quickly:

  • find preferred vendors for any product or service
  • identify the (discount) codes they use on the vendor’s site to ensure the organization receives their (GPO’s) pricing
  • request a virtual card for the product(s) or service(s)
  • instantly receive that virtual card if the purchase satisfies all defined organizational requirements
  • pay with that virtual card
  • … and capture the e-commerce receipt for automatic submission to the Procurement/AP department

In other words, for the average buyer, with the exception that they have to pull down the in-browser app to find the allowed/preferred vendors, request the virtual card, and then access and use the virtual card (when the request is approved), it’s a super minimally intrusive Procurement app that allows them to buy in the traditional e-commerce style they are used to without having to learn any new Procurement systems. Compare that to even the modern orchestration systems where these same users would have to log-in to the enterprise app, use the wizards, or, even worse, try to converse with the Gen-AI engine (that shows them the latest pair of Nikes when they want brake shoes to fix the delivery truck), and then jump to either the organizational catalog, or, if they are lucky, punch-out to the e-commerce site where they populate a cart they then have to pull back. In other words, BlueBean makes the average orchestration system look like overkill. (As orchestration was another app developed for Enterprise customers that needed a lot of Procurement modules and solutions, not mid-markets.)

The founders of BlueBean, who have built a number of enterprise Procurement systems, realized that while you need a Procurement system for large(r), strategic Procurements, also realized that for “tail” spend, traditional Procurement processes and systems are overkill, and this is why you have people avoiding them and/or being non-compliant.

The founders of BlueBean also realized that in order for an organization to have proper spend management, even Tail Spend needs to be managed, and, more importantly, it needs to be captured. So they created an app that allowed for Procurement to manage this tail spend without requiring organizational users, who just have to use the browser extension, to learn new tools or processes, which distracts these users from the job they need to do.

So they built a simple enterprise e-Commerce platform that is like a punch-out catalog management, p-card management, tail-spend procurement, budget-management, and a paypal/stripe platform all rolled into one — which also simplifies the process and technology landscape for overworked and under-staffed Mid-Market Procurement teams who need to roll out something to manage the majority of enterprise transactions that doesn’t fall under the strategic procurement spend they barely have time to manage (when you include all the OT they likely have to work).

Right now, the just-launched BlueBean platform contains the following capabilities:

  • Company Profile: the company profile (with subscription details)
  • My Profile: the Procurement user’s profile and access details
  • Account Details: the company’s expense account details — available and pending funding and linked bank accounts
  • Virtual Cards: the virtual cards that have been issued, and the users / teams they have been assigned to
  • Transactions: all transactions that have been put through the BlueBean platform (for the prescribed time-frame) (with receipt attachments)
  • Spending Limits: by person or team (or category, as a team can be setup per category)
  • User Management: the platform users (with their details, limits, etc.)
  • Savings MarketPlace: the sites that have been approved for organizational buying by the organization (from the BlueBean marketplace or the organization’s GPO marketplace), organized by category, broken down by savings plan (to keep track of each GPO, department, etc.)
  • Preferred Stores: the e-commerce sites that the organization has marked as preferred
  • Statements: monthly P-Card-like statements that can be downloaded or exported to your accounting system
  • Reports: simple, on-line, dynamic spend breakdowns by category, time-period, team/user, etc.
  • Security: security configuration

And, as noted, BlueBean allows for direct export of all transactional data, with receipts, into the accounting platform for full spend tracking and classification (by vendor and default category), which allows more organizational spend to be (at least minimally) under management.

It’s a very neat solution for a mid-market organization that needs to get tail-spend / end-user spend under management and under control, but doesn’t have a large Procurement team, the resources to train organizational users, or the time to impose full Procurement processes on organizational users who just need to get a job done. So, if this sounds like something your organization needs, even though they are the new kid (on the block), the doctor would recommend checking out BlueBean and giving your organization the caffeine-rush it desperately needs. It’s serving a niche that hasn’t been effectively served yet (as most existing Tail-Spend solutions were defined for larger organizations and most orchestration platforms require one or more Procurement solutions to already be in place, and a mid-market Procurement team doesn’t have the manpower, budget, or time to manage more platforms than absolutely necessary). The minimal imposition will make your end users happy (and that leads to adoption).

The Sourcing Innovation Source-to-Pay+ Mega Map!

Now slightly less useless than every other logo map that clogs your feeds!

1. Every vendor verified to still be operating as of 4 days ago!
Compare that to the maps that often have vendors / solutions that haven’t been in business / operating as a standalone entity in months on the day of release! (Or “best-of” lists that sometimes have vendors that haven’t existed in 4 years! the doctor has seen both — this year!)

2. Every vendor logo is clickable!
the doctor doesn’t know about you, but he finds it incredibly useless when all you get is a strange symbol with no explanation or a font so small that you would need an electron microscope to read it. So, to fix that, every logo is clickable so you can go to the site and at least figure out who the vendor is.

3. Every vendor is mapped to the closest standard category/categories!
Furthermore, every category has the standard definitions used by Sourcing Innovation and Spend Matters!
the doctor can’t make sense of random categories like “specialists” or “collaborative” or “innovative“, despises when maps follow this new age analyst/consultancy award trend and give you labels you just can’t use, and gets red in the face when two very distinct categories (like e-Sourcing and Marketplaces or Expenses and AP are merged into one). Now, the doctor will also readily admit that this means that not all vendors in a category are necessarily comparable on an apples-to-apples basis, but that was never the case anyway as most solutions in a category break down into subcategories and, for example, in Supplier Management (SXM) alone, you have a CORNED QUIP mash of solutions that could be focused on just a small subset of the (at least) ten different (primary) capabilities. (See the link on the sidebar that takes you to a post that indexes 90+ Supplier Management vendors across 10 key capabilities.)

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