Last week, I had the pleasure of attending IvaluaNOW, Ivalua’s bi-annual user conference in Chicago. It follows closely on the heals of its other user conference, IvaluaNOW in Paris, which it held in early April. Founded in 2000, Ivalua provides strategic sourcing and procure-to-pay solutions for enterprises to drive source-to-pay digital transformation tailored to fit their unique needs. Ivalua has more than 450 employees working out of 13 offices on five continents, and has headquarters in Redwood City, California and Paris, France. It currently manages more than $500 billion in annual spend for its more than 300 global customers, and it boasts a customer retention rate greater than 98%. The company has more than 30 corporate partners that help to implement its source-to-settle solutions and extend its native capabilities with niche solution integrations.
Alex Saric, Ivalua’s Chief Marketing Officer, served as Master of Ceremonies for Day 1 and Day 2 of the event. He kicked off the event by putting its theme, “The Art of Procurement,” into perspective. There are a lot of parallels between digital transformation and art, he said. For starters, as children, many of us begin painting “by numbers,” then move on to progressively more advanced methods and canvasses. Most of us reach a certain level of skill and talent before plateauing. But some of us find our passion and talents in the arts, and pursue a whole other tier of performance where we strive to achieve competitive advantage. The same can be said for Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) and procurement teams: there are artists among painters.
Ivalua: A Portrait of the Company as a Market Innovator
Alex then introduced Ivalua CEO and Founder, David Khuat-Duy, who provided a “state of the company” to conference attendees. Referencing the company’s high customer retention rate, David acknowledged that Ivalua cannot be successful without its customers. To that end, Ivalua has taken in $115 million in revenue thus far in calendar year 2019, enabling the company to undertake a hiring binge and grow by 50% in staff.
According to David, Ivalua provides “a complete, unified source-to-pay suite” for driving digital transformation, and as a result, customers and customer organizations can “start anywhere, go everywhere, and see everything” along the source-to-pay spectrum. This is necessary for the many organizations that lack the budgetary resources, executive support, and line-of-business skill sets to go all-in at once on source-to-pay digital transformation. They can implement portions of the Ivalua suite to fit their spend management needs and means.
The Ivalua advantage, said David, is its 1) Rapid time-to-value with an “out of the box” solution, 2) Flexibility to grow within a very configurable platform, 3) a complete, unified suite that, according to David and his team, also features “best of breed capabilities.” While “most technologies become a roadblock,” David believes that Ivalua’s source-to-pay solution suite enables its users to realize value, scale resources, and drive viability and visibility into business spend management.
David then briefly covered highlights from Ivalua’s Release 162, which include:
- Search360 — Ivalua’s intelligent and dynamic catalog search, management, and eProcurement feature;
- Direct Materials innovations — as a result of Ivalua acquiring DirectWorks, the Ivalua platform now enables users to manage Bill of Materials (BoMs) and Purchase Orders (POs), and conduct forecasting;
- Category management – a new release, which provides users with a 360-degree view into categories;
- Ivalua’s Integrated Virtual Assistant, IVA (pronounced “Eva”) – providing users with their own voice-activated personal assistant that takes and executes upon voice command (more on this later); and finally,
- A new design mode meant to “delight” customers via an enhanced user interface (UI) and user experience (UX).
2019-2020 Company and Product Roadmap
David then took the audience through Ivalua’s company and product roadmap for the next year and a half. Ivalua officials are focused on the following four areas to drive continued success:
One: Improved Business Insights
- Sourcing Optimization — “This is not just for data scientists,” said David, “but greater access to everyone; with artificial intelligence (AI).”
- Predictive Spend Analytics
- Cost repository management
Two: Customer Delight
- Guided buying
- Digital assistant (IVA)
- Guided contracting
Three: Effective Compliance/Risk
- Smart Contracting (implementing “AI”)
- Supplier risk monitoring / 3rd Party integration
- Advanced product quality planning — quality process control in manufacturing
Four: Faster Time-to-Value
- Pre-packaged best-practice solutions (e.g., a quick deployment package for Ivalua’s P2P solution)
- Industry configurations
- Packaged integrations
Showcasing Innovation
After a fantastic keynote address by strategic / technology futurist and TEDx speaker, Nancy Giordano, followed by presentations on building momentum for and executing a successful digital transformation, we heard from Vishal Patel, Ivalua’s Vice President of Product Marketing (and Ardent Partners highly-esteemed alum). Vishal further discussed Ivalua’s strategic vision for AI, which is to embed it into the core platform for multiple use cases across the source-to-settle spectrum.
According to Vishal, there are three layers of AI within the platform: 1) the Engagement Layer, where users actually use the platform, 2) the Intelligence Layer, where insight is distilled from data, and 3) the Data Layer, where data is pulled in from various sources and analyzed intelligently. There are three goals for doing this: 1) improve decision making for all users, 2) automate tasks, especially those that are tactical, scalable, and repeatable, and 3) provide a new way for end users to engage with the Ivalua platform.
To these ends, Ivalua recently unveiled IVA (“Eva”), its intelligent virtual assistant that features natural language processing and chat bots that enable users to interact with it by voice or chat. It also provides guided buying (for those occasional users), and alerting features that autonomously “alert up” when there is an issue, rather than require the user to “drill down” into dashboards when time is of the essence and users need to know something right away. Ivalua is one of the few supply management solution providers to offer such a feature (another is Basware).
Public Sector Procurement Transformation: Artful Innovation
One of the more interesting customer discussions occurred on a panel of government procurement professionals on Day 2 of the event. On the panel were Daniel Symon, CPO for New York City, Jesse Buggs, Senior Manager of Global Procurement Solutions, and Mike Cook, Head of Public Sector at Ivalua. Collectively, they are trying to build a more diverse supplier base, particularly with women, veteran, and minority-owned businesses, to make public sector awards more equitable and drive new sources of innovation. They are trying to create an attractive working environment that draws more Millennials into the profession, something with which other industries, like manufacturing, also struggle. And they are trying to capitalize on recent trends in the public sector — a shift towards digital technologies and innovations — which sometimes puts government agencies out in front of the private sector. The discussion captured the essence of driving digital transformation in procurement, particularly the public sector: it’s a long and complicated process, but it’s a worthy and noble endeavor.
Final Thoughts
While “The Art of Procurement” was the theme of IvaluaNOW 2019, digital transformation really was its essence — from driving AI up and down Ivalua’s platform and across the source-to-settle spectrum to fast(er) integrations, user-friendly applications, pre-packaged solutions, and a host of innovations in development through 2020. Exciting times are upon Ivalua…and ahead…for the company and its customers.
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