Publisher’s Note: In 2019, Ardent Partners is celebrating 10 years of delivering “Research with Results” to Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) and other readers of this site, including published reports, eBooks, presentations, insights, articles and events. To commemorate the occasion, we are going to reflect on the firm’s first decade by presenting this weekly “throwback” series that includes a blend of top articles from our earlier days on this site. Despite procurement’s recent advances, we believe these articles are as topical and relevant as the day they were published.

In light of our fourth-annual procurement executive summit, CPO Rising, now just a few days away, we thought we’d highlight one of the finalists for this year’s CPO Honors award program, BuyerQuest. The Berea, Ohio-based Procure-to-Pay (P2P) solutions provider is a finalist for the Innovative Solution of the Year award, along with Boston-based Fairmarkit. Good luck to both, and enjoy!

The Ardent Partners’ analyst team recently received a briefing and product demonstration from representatives from BuyerQuest. Doug Blossey, senior vice president of corporate strategy, and Kyle Muskoff, vice president of product and professional services, led the briefing and demo; today’s article is a high-level overview of what we learned.

As a refresher, BuyerQuest offers P2P solutions that include eProcurement, eInvoicing, and a B2B marketplace solution that delivers a B2C eCommerce-like experience. Each of these solutions can be offered as individual applications or together as a solution suite. BuyerQuest was launched in October, 2011 by a group of industry veterans in the procurement technology and consultancy sectors. It is headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio and has offices across North America, Europe, and Australia.

Going Beyond Punch-Out in B2B Commerce

Doug began the briefing with a quick review of the evolution of B2B procurement platforms – going back to the late 1990s when the first generation of these tools featured punch-out catalogs. Although the tools evolved over time to connect to a business or supplier network, to become fully P2P, and to migrate to the cloud, many P2P platforms today still punch out users to supplier catalogs and sites. But according to Doug, BuyerQuest’s leaders seized upon the B2C eCommerce model in which “starting with search” drives the user experience and adapted it for the B2B buying experience; and for good reasons. “If you don’t give them something that’s easy to use, they’ll get frustrated and leave,” said Doug. As a result, BuyerQuest wanted to provide an easy buying experience not just for experienced procurement workers, but also line-of-business users that do not regularly interact with a procurement tool. Doug’s perspective is that buyers want a simple B2C-style purchasing experience and that this has been critical to BuyerQuest’s success.

From there, Kyle took control of the briefing to give Ardent analysts a demonstration of the BuyerQuest platform. As expected, enterprise buyers do not punch out – they search to locate the desired product or service as though they were shopping on Amazon.com or Target.com. Like eCommerce websites, BuyerQuest’s P2P solution features contextual search functionality that is personalized to the user and delivers relevant information to buyers throughout the process. Users have the ability to filter and sort through results that are supplier agnostic. It also provides rich content, like item images, descriptions, characteristics, and configurable items. Lastly, because it is cloud-based, the platform is scalable and able to support millions of SKUs in its marketplace.

When a user attempts to make a purchase, they review their order in the tool where they can edit the order, add a note to the supplier, add an approver to the approver chain, and ultimately submit the request. At that time, their approver gets alerted – either by an email or when they log into the platform. Approvers are given administrative rights to the system and are enabled to approve or deny purchases.

As for suppliers, BuyerQuest’s solution features a Supplier Portal that purposely mimics what buyers see so that the supplier has insight into what their buyers see and need. Suppliers update catalogs regularly – even weekly. This also allows supplies to describe their products as they wish and update them as frequently as they would like.

Final Thoughts

As usability, intuitive user interface, and a positive user experience become paramount to driving high usage, BuyerQuest’s punch-out P2P tool looks like it can punch its weight and go a full 12 rounds. Ardent Partners analysts are looking forward to seeing what else BuyerQuest intends to take on in the second half of the year and what other innovative features and functions it looks to add to its formidable P2P platform. Stay tuned.

This article originally published on CPO Rising on July 9, 2018.

Tagged in: Ardent Team, Innovation, P2P, Solution Providers, Strategy, Technology