We at Ardent Partners take the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic with the utmost seriousness. Accordingly, we have taken organizational precautions to minimize the risk of staff infection and the spread of the virus in our communities, including a 100% virtual work order and a ban on all work travel, including local, until further notice. We have no idea what the reach of this insidious virus is or will be – so, like you, we sit watching, waiting, and hoping. At the same time, we believe that our local communities and families are resilient… and we know that the supply management industry is resilient. We have faced and met large global challenges before and we will face and meet them again. So, we press on, continuing to offer our research digitally and virtually to our global community. We welcome all and any comments regarding our approach – submit them here – and, we wish you all safety, calm, and good fortune in these uncertain times.
EcoVadis Secures Funding from Investors, Integrates with SAP Ariba
Within the past month, there have been a pair of significant announcements concerning EcoVadis, a Paris- and New York-based provider of corporate social responsibility (CSR) rating services for procurement and supply chain teams. First, in late February, Bain & Company announced that it, along with private-equity firm, CVC, had made a minority investment in EcoVadis for an undisclosed sum. Along with the investment, Bain & Company will integrate EcoVadis’s CSR and sustainability rating tools into its corporate strategy, procurement, and supply chain operations. It will also look to incorporate them into fund strategy, diligence and post-acquisition approaches for financial investors.
And just last week, EcoVadis announced that it has successfully integrated the EcoVadis API Connector for SAP Ariba Supplier Risk within the SAP App Center. As a result, SAP Ariba users will be able to access EcoVadis’s supplier CSR and sustainability performance ratings within the Supplier Risk tool on the Ariba Network, rather than having to leave the app and toggle over to EcoVadis for the information. They’ll be able to access performance ratings and incorporate them into their supplier risk assessments without disrupting their workflow. Other capabilities include: supplier matching between EcoVadis and SAP Ariba databases, full access to EcoVadis’s supplier sustainability performance ratings and scorecards within the SAP Ariba Supplier Risk module; access to suppliers’ strengths and weaknesses across environmental, social, and ethical criteria; 360 Watch media monitoring for adverse supplier news; and the ability for procurement teams to easily request new supplier sustainability ratings.
Apttus Partners with Netcompany on Quote-to-Cash in EMEA
Late last month, Apttus, the California-based quote-to-cash, contract, and supplier management solutions provider, announced a partnership with Netcompany, a Denmark-based provider of IT consulting and operations services, to drive quote-to-cash across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Netcompany will become an Apttus partner and help to expand the use adoption of Apttus’s quote-to-cash solutions via its existing client base and broader network across these markets.
DocuSign Acquires Contract Management Solutions Provider, Seal
Late last month, DocuSign, a San Francisco-based provider of cloud-based eSignature and Digital Transaction Management solutions, announced that is acquiring fellow Bay-area contract discovery and analytics solutions provider, Seal Software, for $188 million. This follows a series of investments from DocuSign in Seal over the past couple of years: a $15 million investment in March 2019 and a $30 million investment in the summer of 2018 (read our coverage of the news here).
The deal is part of DocuSign’s overall strategy to move towards intelligent contract search, discovery, and analysis, and onto what it is now calling the Agreement Cloud. Seal already powers a couple of DocuSign’s products and services. DocuSign will continue to sell Seal’s analytics capabilities, and integrate Seal’s AI technology within DocuSign’s CLM system. In turn, Seal customers will gain greater access to DocuSign’s Agreement Cloud. The deal has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies, as well as Seal’s stockholders. The deal is expected to close in the first half of DocuSign’s fiscal year.
2020 Vision: SpendHQ’s New Spend Analysis Tool for the New Decade
The Ardent Partners team recently took a briefing from SpendHQ, the Atlanta-based provider of spend analysis SaaS solutions for procurement. The SpendHQ team (“SpendHQ”) briefed us on their year in review, on the roll out of their new spend analysis engine and dashboard, and previewed some developments to come in the later part of 2020. Readers can read the full write up here.
To date, the company has analyzed more than $4 trillion in customer spend, has categorized more than 20 million total unique vendor records, and boasts a 97% spend categorization guarantee. According to the SpendHQ team, the company achieved a three-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31%; they are endeavoring to achieve a sustained 30%-40% growth rate for 2020. Additionally, the client names that they added were impressive and a great cross section of company sizes, industries and geographies.
In late 2019, SpendHQ refreshed its SaaS-based spend analysis engine and dashboard. The solution presents with a clean user interface and a shiny new dashboard built with entirely new visualization and analytics tools. Users have the ability to customize the standard dashboard with a variety of widgets/reports/etc. that they can access within their analytics environment so that the most important spend information and metrics are most easily accessed. It features new filtering capabilities that allow users to view spend by category, supplier, period of time, and other dimensions. Users now have the ability to toggle between chart types, too — for example, between bar charts and line charts — depending on what they’re trying to visualize. According to SpendHQ, the new user interface “surfaces” new suppliers acquired within a date range; users can also filter out some suppliers based on spend levels.
Moving forward, SpendHQ sees opportunities to further differentiate themselves in the market. For example, they are looking at ways for procurement teams to assess their own performance by objectively looking at KPIs and then reporting their findings to external teams. SpendHQ is also partnering with ScoutRFP to integrate its spend analysis tool with Scout’s strategic sourcing solutions.
ProcessUnity Reconfigures Vendor Risk Management Solution
Last month, ProcessUnity, a Concord, MA-based provider of cloud-based risk and compliance management solutions, informed us that they have reconfigured their Vendor Risk Management (VRM) solution. Dubbed the Best Practices Configuration, the new, pre-built VRM is said to be operable within a few weeks and offer users a variety of capabilities. These include the ability model third parties and related performance and requests, pre-configured workflows for repeated process execution, industry-standard vendor questionnaires, built-in calculations and scoring of vendors supplier across a variety of factors, a dedicated vendor portal, and interactive, preconfigured dashboards and reports.
Interos Updates Intelligent Third-Party Risk Management Platform
Finally, earlier this month, Interos, an Arlington, VA-based provider of third-party risk management solutions in the cloud, announced the second release of its multi-tier, multi-factor third-party risk management platform. Interos V2.0 boasts an automated third-party discovery capability that — using machine learning and natural language processing — can extend beyond the third-tier, indefinitely. Along the way, it scans these vendors in the supply chain for financial, cyber, geographic, operational, and governance risks and provides results in real time. Interos V2.0 provides users with header-level views of suppliers for these risk categories, as well as high-risk supplier outlier detection, advanced visualization features, mult-faceted filtering, and detailed risk insights. Interos V2.0 is generally available to customers today.
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