[Publisher’s Note: Ardent Partners continues to increase its coverage of solution providers that serve our readership in the supply management market. In 2015, we will continue to accelerate our coverage of the solution providers that matter on these pages and in our published research.
If you are a solution provider focused on this space and are not on a regular briefing schedule with us, we welcome the opportunity to meet and brief with you. Please reach out to me and our staff for more details.]
The first time I met with the team at Rosslyn Analytics, I was in the respectable, but curiously named, Balls Brothers Wine Bar near Victoria Station in London. The occasion was one of the company’s client “happy hours” that it frequently hosted. All in all, it was a pleasant occasion with a lively mix of customers who were very interested in procurement, spend analysis, and libations, although not necessarily in that order. And, even though they had been plied by wine and beer, Rosslyn’s clients were generally quite happy with the then upstart provider and its solutions. That was a few years ago and I’ve subsequently met with several of the executives at various times prior to its IPO in March of 2014. Once the dust had settled from that exciting capital raise, we recently caught up with Rosslyn Analytics’ Founder and CEO, Charlie Clark, Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Sweetman, and Chief Marketing Officer, Lance Mercereau to get an update and learn more about some of the company’s newer offerings. Today we share some of the highlights from this recent briefing.
Rosslyn Analytics
Rosslyn Analytics, a subsidiary of Rosslyn Data Technologies (LSE: RDT) and a UK-based spend intelligence and analytics solution provider, was founded on the premise that most businesses struggle with the management of their structured and unstructured data and that what they were able to pull from their various source systems was generally of low quality. The company’s founders say that they came to this realization in the early part of the last decade while working with the finance and supply chain teams of several large British corporations that had this exact problem. They felt that there was an opportunity to develop and deliver a low-cost, user-friendly spend analysis solution and set forth to build it. The result was RAPid, a cloud-based data management and spend analysis platform and a new company was born.
Today the RAPid solution has evolved into an on-demand, interactive spend analysis platform that features in-memory computing and is used by a reported network of nearly 7,000 end users who use the system to extract, cleanse, enrich, and present/analyze enterprise data. Rosslyn executives say that their solution’s PRISM engine, which enables “machine learning” within its automated enrichment capabilities, is a unique differentiator for the company and creates a network effect. “The more people that are on the platform the better and more enriched the data becomes,” explained Charlie Clark, because RAPid allows real-time data cleansing and categorization that is automatically saved and propogated within the platform.
This means that as system users take action on their data – re-categorize spend, correct company parent-child relationships, improve the overall data quality, etc. – the system captures these improvements in real-time and saves them to the benefit of other users. RAPid also allows a clear audit trail, enabling managers to see workflows and approve changes made. After changes are made, the data is fed back into what Charlie calls “the refinery,” where it melds with additional data to improve data integrity.
In mid-October, Rosslyn Analytics launched RAPid In-Touch, a natively built, mobile enabled, on-demand supplier management program that will allow end-users to capture supplier data for use in RFIs, RFPs, RFQs, etc. Initially the ofering will focus on supplier scorecarding and surveys which can be combined with spend data to help procurement teams better understand their suppliers’ performance and capabilities.
RAPid In-Touch features dashboards compatible with RAPid, allowing for discrete and multivariate analysis in-line with its sister program. With In-Touch, end-users can draw free-form data from multiple sources (e.g., Excel, Access, survey programs, etc.) into a common location to perform complex analysis that draws upon a variety of inputs.
While our discussion stayed focused on the procurement/finance/supply chain focused solutions, Rosslyn’s solutions extend into different business process areas. According to the Rosslyn team, RAPid In-Touch adoption is growing inside and outside of procurement, particularly among HR and product development teams, that are using the tool to get real-time feedback on their services and stakeholder needs. This has helped Rosslyn Analytics sign on roughly four to five new enterprise clients every month for the service, including a large North American health insurance provider that had been a development partner.
What’s Next for Rosslyn Analytics in 2015?
Charlie noted that expansion into North America and the U.S., in particular, will be very important to Rosslyn Analytics’ long-term success. Lance Mercereau also added that Rosslyn is also planning a series of product releases in the first and second quarters of 2015 and that the company also plans to build out its partner network (current partners include Xerox, WNS, Pitney Bowes, and Perfect Commerce). Lance also said that Rosslyn expects to make an announcement soon related to its PRISM solution. “Integration is very, very important to our strategy,” said Charlie. “We’ve got some very disruptive ideas as to how we take the product to the next stage.”
Supply management is a marketplace in need of disruption so we’ll be sure to see if Rosslyn’s execution matches its vision this year.
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