Ahead of BravoSolution’s user group in London this week, we caught up with Jim Wetekamp, BravoSolution’s CEO and Andrea Brody, Bravo’s new SVP of Marketing, to get a general update and discuss “BravoAdvantage,” the company’s latest release of its full strategic sourcing and supplier management suite.
Bravo by the Numbers
With its global footprint, it is sometimes easy to forget how large Bravo is and has become. With a reported $88 million in revenue in 2014 (and 14 consecutive years of growth), Bravo is actually one of the largest providers in the supply management space. The revenue is drawn from a customer base of 600, who account for more than 65,000 users, 700,000 suppliers and more than € 500 billion of spend under management. The company also employs 600 professionals located in 12 countries.
When you drill down into the revenue numbers what we see is that software bookings were up 60% compared to the previous year. This is impressive growth and we expect to see Bravo’s growth in its software area outpace its other revenue lines. Readers may recall that Jim was appointed CEO last fall and stated at the time that he plans to build upon the company’s success in the technology market and develop an even stronger product portfolio – this is a strategy that Jim had been driving within Bravo before he became its CEO (read our coverage of Jim’s appointment here).
Jim believes that their number one growth opportunity remains in the U.S., where BravoSolution has a substantial presence and many clients, but still sees significant market share to be had. Meanwhile, the UK has seen double-digit growth, and the Middle East/North Africa market has been one of their fastest growing markets over the past three to four years. He also sees some opportunity in their two newest markets, Australia and the Nordics.
BravoAdvantage: Pushing Strategic Procurement to the Next Level
BravoSolution’s newest release of its sourcing and supplier management platform seeks to address many of the long-standing challenges that modern procurement teams of all maturity classes face when trying to add value to their organization. In effect, Bravo is focused on building solutions that can help these groups move from more a more traditional approach to one that is needed in today’s faster moving and more complex world.
Jim framed BravoAdvantage in terms of its agility and flexibility. Depending on enterprise needs, it can be delivered on-premise, in the cloud, or on a virtual workstation. It can also be modularly deployed, allowing enterprises to prioritize some features over others (and pay for only what they use and value). Procurement teams can also use it as a vehicle to support category management processes or supplier management/vendor on-boarding processes or support more traditional sourcing processes, like spend analysis, opportunity identification, sourcing, and contract management. BravoAdvantage is enabled for regulated and non-regulated industries – ensuring that it has all the controls, security requirements, transparency requirements around public-sector procurement processes.
The result, according to Jim, is BravoAdvantage, a next generation release that builds upon the earlier Bravo platform and allows procurement teams to be proactive, collaborative, and to take a holistic view of the sourcing process. Moreover, the solution serves as a supplier intelligence repository and a supply risk management tool, providing a 360 degree view of an organization’s suppliers. In doing so, it helps organizations “develop an agile and partner-oriented supply base.” So what exactly does BravoAdvantage feature?
Spend Analysis: an automated application that provides visibility into spend patterns, behavior, and compliance that is “enriched with supplier segmentation, risk, and status.”
Sourcing / Sourcing Plus: Taking what was already deep functionality in sourcing, BravoSolution has created “Sourcing Plus” which incorporates the “optimization” capabilities that are available in Bravo’s Advanced Sourcing solution (which is typically delivered with support services). By building sourcing optimization into its eSourcing solution, users will be able to collect more robust bids (greater volume of information from the supply base), and then manage them through different scenarios so that users can evaluate the trade offs among different decision criteria – risk, capacity, bundles, sourcing, different supplier relationships – all within a customer-driven platform.
Contract Lifecycle Management: This fully-integrated application supports the enterprise from demand origination to contract execution, and allows users to roll up “individual contract performance” to the enterprise level for supplier evaluations and risk management.
Supplier Value Management: a holistic, supplier-centric application encompassing supplier “onboarding, segmentation, evaluation, risk, and development with 360 degree supplier integration.” According to Jim, this is the area that BravoSolution has invested the most in recently. It allows procurement teams to work with their supplier base, better understand who they are, qualify, segment, manage their risk, and develop those relationships.
Savings Management: this feature analysis the difference between negotiated savings, realized savings, and price variance, and pulls in other pieces of information, such as “supplier development contributions from innovation, quality, and efficiency improvements.”
Jim believes that the addition/expansion of the Supplier Value Management solution will strengthen all other aspects of the platform. For instance, by taking a more supplier-centric model, spend analysis can deliver more insight to a user about who their supplier is, what their status is, what their segment is, and how they compare to other suppliers within that segment. Savings management becomes more robust because it moves beyond just price changes against contracts; it’s additionally driven by innovation, contribution, risk mitigation, and efficiency improvements, said Jim. Regarding sourcing, enterprises becomes more informed in terms of factoring in risk, supplier status, and relationships into their sourcing decisions. Supplier Value Management also enhances contract management by providing a more holistic view of supplier compliance and performance. Enterprises can drill down into individual contract KPI performance, or roll up to project or enterprise-wide performance and gain a 360 degree view of their supplier performance.
Initial Release
BravoSolution formally launched BravoAdvantage at the BravoConnect function in London yesterday (June 10) but BravoAdvantage has been in production for some time and is live with a number of customers; it also continues to upgrade many of its cloud customers on a regular release cycle. Jim says that they have seen great response from some of their current customers, particularly in terms of their extensions into Supplier Value Management.
Final Thoughts
BravoAdvantage is coming out during an exciting time when the need to be agile and innovative in procurement has never been greater. A flexible, configurable, end-to-end sourcing solution that places supplier management at its center and drives visibility throughout the process, no matter the configuration, is a bold step forward for Bravo, as it begins to redefine its own future. It will be interesting to see how the market and procurement practitioners respond to Bravolution’s newest offering. We will be watching closely.
[Publisher’s Note: Ardent Partners continues to increase its coverage of solution providers that serve our readership in the supply management market 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.]
RELATED ARTICLES
Spend Analysis & Sourcing: Connecting the Sourcing Dots for Greater Value
The State of Strategic Sourcing: Collaborate and Connect the Dots
Technology Round-Up – October 14, 2014
BravoSolution and Basware Form Global Partnership to Attack the Source-to-Pay Market