Editor’s Note: CPO Rising’s Procurement Influencer Series continues today with a unique piece from the co-founders of ScoutRFP. Some time ago, Andrew Bartolini sat down with Stan Garber (President), and Alex Yakubovich (CEO), for an in-depth discussion. The following transcript of that conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Andrew Bartolini: Alex and Stan, welcome to the Procurement Influencer Series – could you give a quick introduction of yourself and your company?
Alex Yakubovich: We launched Scout RFP in 2014 and we’ve grown rapidly into a leading sourcing and supplier engagement platform. We continuously add intuitive, innovative capabilities to help businesses unlock previously hidden sources of savings and business impact.
Stan Garber: Scout works with some of the largest companies in the world, in industries from financial services to technology, manufacturing to retail, and more. We serve over 200 customers in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas. We currently work with Adobe, Anadarko, Best Buy, Dish Networks, easyJet, Gilead Sciences, HD Supply, Levi’s, Micron Technology, Owens Corning, ResMed, Salesforce, Smucker’s, Workday, Xero, and Zappos.
AB: Please share a bit about what Scout offers and how the idea to build a sourcing and supplier engagement platform came to fruition?
AY: In our work and through speaking with hundreds of procurement professionals, we realized most sourcing still happens manually. Some procurement teams use clunky, legacy applications, some have co-opted tools originally built for finance or sales, and some are stuck with spreadsheets and emails.
Even when procurement teams use dedicated solutions, the tools are often difficult to use, resulting in roughly 10% adoption. Adoption is particularly abysmal with large end-to-end suites. Unsurprisingly, when you give people clunky tools, they avoid using them and return to familiar, manual (slow) processes. Eventually, the business starts to see procurement as a roadblock and avoids Sourcing teams in favor of working directly with vendors, resulting in large amounts of unmanaged, unnegotiated spend and more importantly non standardized contracts.
We realized there was a huge opportunity to bring procurement into the 21st century and empower the entire enterprise to become more strategic, competitive, and profitable. With this in mind, we built the first iteration of Scout – an online RFP tool that was simple and intuitive for Sourcing, stakeholders, and suppliers alike. It was a huge success and Scout quickly built out additional capabilities. Today, Scout is a comprehensive source-to-contract solution that prioritizes the user experience.
SG: We really do emphasize the customer experience in every aspect of our business. Before expanding beyond online RFPs, we dove deeper with our customers. With their help, we identified additional manual workflows in sourcing and expanded our existing product by adding modules called Pipeline, Contracts, and Supplier Performance. Now, Scout helps manage a holistic view of sourcing projects and brings visibility to procurement’s total impact.
Scout is one of the first providers in the industry to loudly beat the drum on how critical adoption is for any technology solution. It doesn’t matter how many bells and whistles a tool has; if it’s not easy to use, nobody will use it. We primarily drive for adoption to enable sourcing departments to access their data across the source-to-settle process. We know that if they can do that, they can make data-driven decisions based on their pipeline and supplier performance and lead their business to success.
AB: As a young company, you have entered into the procurement space at a time of transformational change, which I believe has allowed Scout to build something that’s much more aligned with the needs of sourcing today. I’m wondering: where does Scout see the direction of the procurement profession heading?
AY: In general, transformational change today is focusing more on openness and connectivity, and the procurement profession is no different. In software, just listen to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff or look to technology giants Microsoft and Google and recently IPO-ed Zoom and Slack.
Big companies that historically have been pretty closed now say very different things in terms of openness. They’re talking about an increased emphasis on collaboration and customer centricity, which is a wonderful thing for our customers and industry. The debate between choosing a best-of-breed or a solution suite is coming to a close in favor of helping connect the whole application and API ecosystem.
SG: When it comes to procurement, there is so much opportunity ahead of us related to the trends of openness and connectivity. The amazing thing for procurement is that today’s technology empowers us to leverage data and make data-driven decisions in a way that’s faster and more effective than ever.
The procurement industry is evolving from decisions based on anecdotal evidence, “gut feel,” or sticking with incumbent suppliers. Now, people want to see data before making decisions. This visibility is especially important in sourcing, which has traditionally seen relationship-driven conversations between customers and suppliers. So, the challenge has become: what tools will help give procurement the best quality data and visualizations of that data? At Scout, we’re tackling this head on and so excited to see these changes.
AB: Where do you see the sourcing and procurement market in five and ten years from now?
AY: The future is bright for sourcing and procurement technology. Today, organizations are finally appreciating the power that sourcing and procurement have beyond savings.
Historically, the way the big ERP providers, such as Oracle and SAP, and suite providers, like Jaggaer and Coupa, entered the organization has been via finance. On the other hand, dedicated sourcing and procurement tools see their champions directly in sourcing and procurement. We’re seeing sourcing and procurement leaders start the technology conversation and have a much bigger voice.
SG: At our annual SPARK customer conference in 2019, former CEO of GE Jeff Immelt said, “These are your tools. They should elevate your voice. You should be able to drive that conversation.” Whether teams work with Scout or other providers, we’re all experiencing the same unstoppable momentum: as an industry, we’re focusing on the user and the customer more than ever.
Ultimately, we’re here to serve the users, make their lives better, and help them deliver a bigger impact. From an industry standpoint, this trend will help push the entire sourcing and procurement functions higher in the organizations. And we are empowering them to do so.
AB: I think Scout has the right direction and is trying to solve what I consider one of procurement’s greatest riddles, which is why I believe that eSourcing hasn’t been used much more broadly and wisely. So this is great – thank you, Alex and Stan.
AY: It’s my pleasure. Thank you, Andrew.
SG: Andrew, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.
Scout RFP is a proud sponsor of CPO Rising 2019, Ardent Partners’ 4th-annual procurement executive symposium that is being held at the Harvard Club of Boston on October 29 & 30. Click here to learn more about our exciting schedule of events and inspiring speaker roster!
