Recently, the analyst team at Ardent Partners sat down with BravoSolution’s President and CEO, Jim Wetekamp, Vice President of Global Marketing, Andrea Brody, and Chief Strategy Officer, Florian Winterstein, for an overview of the company’s recent performance and a detailed discussion of the latest release of BravoAdvantage, the company’s solution suite. Readers may recall that in June, BravoSolution first went to market with BravoAdvantage, which we covered in an article (BravoAdvantage: Taking Sourcing and Supplier Management to the “Next Level”). Today’s article follows up to our initial coverage, including what features and capabilities Bravo has added to the platform, and offers some insight into the company’s Q3 year-over-year performance and a roadmap for 2016.
A Strong Third Quarter for Bravo
On the heels of launching BravoAdvantage in June, BravoSolution reports that it had a 14.6% year-over-year increase in revenue in the third quarter, bolstered by a 23.4% year-over-year increase in SaaS subscriptions. According to Wetekamp, Bravo has been adding customers globally with strong performance in areas like the US, UK, France, Germany, and the Nordic countries, as well as good growth in some of its smaller markets like the UAE and Australia. The overall result was a 24% increase in new bookings and 61 net new customers year-to-date (through Q3, 2015). Looking ahead, Bravo’s leadership sees opportunities for growth in sales bolstered by its continued investment in the BravoAdvantage suite including product management and R & D, as well as general sales and marketing.
BravoAdvantage 16: Expanding on Early Success
When Jim Wetekamp took over as the CEO at Bravo, it was a large global services firm focused on supply management that also had a solution suite comprised of modules of varying capabilities – some very strong areas (spend analysis and advanced sourcing) and some less so. In our first briefing together after he was appointed CEO (in October, 2014), Jim committed to focusing significant resources on improving Bravo’s solution suite and improving/standardizing the way the firm goes to market across all geographies. A mere 15 months later, Bravo is able to show significant advances on the solution side with the release of BravoAdvantage 16.
As a refresher, BravoAdvantage is an end-to-end strategic sourcing solution suite that focuses on supplier value and savings management. It can be cloud-based (SaaS), installed on-premise, or on virtual workstations, and is modular in that customers can add on features as they go. BravoAdvantage encompasses all four “pillars” of strategic sourcing today: spend analysis, sourcing, contract management, and supplier management. But the whole can be much greater than the sum of its parts. According to Wetekamp, “supplier value management” – a unique feature – is central to the platform and drives the deployment of the entire suite.
The latest BravoAdvantage release highlights several main areas including improvements in its Analytics and CLM (“contract lifecycle management”) modules, better savings management capabilities, and what Bravo calls a “seamless” user interface experience across its upstream portfolio (spend analysis, sourcing, contract management, and supplier value management). The biggest news out of the new release, however, may be the formal release of a full source-to-pay offering developed and delivered with an established eProcurement provider. We’ll discuss each of these below.
The Bravo team tells us that focus on the new version of BravoAdvantage Analytics has been to give it a boost with more robust advanced analytics features, allowing users to make more informed sourcing and buying decisions. Meanwhile, enhancements to the contract management module provide users with enhanced approval capabilities, such as dynamic approval workflows and conditional approvals, allowing users to increase collaboration and decrease time-to-decision. Contract approval is also linked to contract creation, allowing approvers to add comments and attachments, and provide a full history of approvals within the contract. All told, these improvements are designed to increase efficiency within the contract approval process, while increasing visibility, and helping to improve process compliance from contract creation to execution.
Bravo officials also touted a “new common user interface experience” across the upstream portion of the platform, which will allow users to seamlessly move from one application to the next, with a single user experience and a suite of solutions that share a common design and UI features. Users can now more easily navigate the suite, collaborate with stakeholders, drill down into dynamic menus based on a specific user criteria, and better personalize their experience.
Enhancements to BravoAdvantage’s Savings Management application takes a more project-based approach to savings management. To do so, the new module promises increased visibility and control over corporate savings initiatives, including improved support for forecasting savings, with users able to collaborate and share information online, as well as more refined “savings values” that can improve the way that users report on savings over time and across business units and categories. Other new features include the ability to provide a formal sign-off on forecasts by all stakeholders, as well as a way to monitor and manage forecast deviation while continuously supporting forecast adjustment and approvals over time. As a result of these new features and improvements, Bravo believes that users can gain increased visibility of their savings initiatives, greater fidelity in their savings forecasts, more detailed reporting on forecasted savings, and a clearer correlation between their cost-saving initiatives and actual savings.
Perhaps the biggest news with the new BravoAdvantage release is that it can now offer a single, integrated “source-to-pay” (S2P) solution by incorporating a partner’s existing eProcurement and invoice capture solution into the Bravo suite. The S2P platform now supports web-based requisitions, automated approval routing, and purchase order creation and delivery, plus the ability to issue a ‘spot buy’ RFQ, and capture invoices. This new offering has been in the works for some time as Bravo struck the partnership last summer and has been packaging/selling it below the radar screen until its formal launch this month.
Bravo’s Roadmap for 2016
As 2016 begins, Bravo plans to continue to improve BravoAdvantage in its next release targeted for 2017, starting with further enhancements to BravoAnalytics, greater integration of the partner’s P2P solution with its overall platform, and extending the platform’s value chain further downstream. The company also tells us that their roadmap includes predictive analytics, a single UI experience across the full S2P offering, and the development of a supplier network.
Final Thoughts
It is encouraging to see that this newest release follows through on Wetekamp’s original plan as this indicates that there will be continued investment in the solution suite. And while some of the enhancements, like the single suite UI and user experience, found in BravoAdvantage 16 are simply bringing the suite up to par with the market, Bravo also has strong modules that have and will continue to compete favorably in the market.
As it continued to increase its emphasis on technology, the move into P2P was inevitable. In this arena, Bravo was wise to find a P2P partner as opposed to building its own P2P solution (a third option of buying a proven code line and building it into the Bravo platform would have been interesting too), but unfortunately, the current partner is not overly strong. As a result, Bravo must now leave at least a part of its future in the hands of smaller partner that has yet to prove itself well in the large enterprise market, particularly on the accounts payable side. Nonetheless, Bravo has strong leadership and access to deep pockets so we expect that while it may hit a few bumps (as all technology partnerships do), it will avoid any serious missteps in developing this partnership and, over time, develop an expertise in the P2P realm that matches its very strong leadership in the upstream space.
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