Earlier this year, we initiated the first of our planned 20 for 2020 series’ as an echo to the 10 for 2010 series that we used to launch this site. That first 2020 series focused on the key themes and ideas that Chief Procurement Officers should have on their agenda this decade. This second series focuses on “Key Providers in 2020” which you can think of as (borrowing from Supply and Demand Chain Executive and countless others), the 20 “Solution Providers to Know” this decade. Today, we continue the series with apexanalytix.
Key Provider in the 2020s – apexanalytix
If you think you know apexanalytix (“Apex”), but have not engaged with them in a few years, you have missed quite a bit. [A]pexanalytix started out over 30 years ago in the recovery audit business and, while the company performs more recovery audits than any other firm globally (servicing more than 200 clients and helping them recover more than $3 Billion last year), they have significantly expanded their core offerings to become a provider offering robust supplier management, accounts payable, and data management solutions.
The company’s lead product is a solution called firststrike, that preemptively stops vendor overpayments before they can be made. Apex says that for every billion dollars of payments that firststrike processes, it stops $2 million in mistaken payments to be made. As organizations continue to track their cash positions much more closely, a solution like firststrike becomes more valuable because it is designed to keep cash on hand as compared to the normal AP audit that may still find the overpayments, but does so with a sizable time lag. The solution also includes fraud detection capabilities
Climbing Higher (into Supplier Management)
As a natural outgrowth of monitoring and tracking supplier transactions, Apex first introduced an initial version of its portal in the early 2000s. The original portal focused almost exclusively on invoice and payment status inquiries. Roughly five years ago, Apex worked to expand the solution and include supplier registration as a key feature. Apex realized that many of its customers’ vendor master data problems emanated from the supplier onboarding process. With the more robust apexportal, clients can streamline their supplier onboarding process while also building in protections to ensure that their vendor master data is both correct and compliant. Apex’ customers can use the portal in concert with a wide range of third-party P2P solutions. When they deploy it, the portal captures the current business rules as well as any tax, financial, or other global regulatory requirements, while also being highly configurable so that users can modify the forms, fields, and overall process in response to the inevitable changes that will occur with internal business requirements and external regulations and governance.
Today, the apexportal has more than 4.4 million suppliers using the portal. The fast growth of the portal has been driven by the different modules that comprise it, including the original supplier registration module, supplier discovery as well as supplier risk and performance management. A sophisticated supply risk dashboard allows companies to centralize their management of financial, operational, geographic, regulatory, and other forms of risk across the supply base while also developing an overall risk score for each supplier.
The portal also offers several supplier self-service features. Beyond the supplier-focused areas available in the portal, Apex also offers a contract repository as well as payments and working capital management solutions that include dynamic discounting.
Analytics, Analytix
Like the second part of the name of the company suggests, Apex has powerful data and predictive analytics that are focused on analyzing supplier transactions and supplier records. The company’s proprietary supplier database contains more than 32M supplier records (Apex catalogs and scores these records for accuracy and age). The company’s analytics engine tracks and then works to predict (and avoid) potential supplier issues (overpayments, contract compliance, etc.). It has also developed supplier “trust” scores that can be based on a wide number of sources. This database serves as the foundation for Apex’ vendor master management and cleansing solution, smartvm.
Smartvm is a combination of Apex’s own supplier database and the integration to more than 650 external (government, regulatory, third party, etc.) data sources to provide real-time vendor master validation and data enrichment. The smartvm solution is used via apexportal so that the data can being validated and enriched in real time. This offering is also available outside of the portal for one time vendor master cleanse and/or other data/research purposes.
The smartvm solution can be accessed by users in three primary ways: (1) via an integration to the apexportal and its supplier registration module which enables validation and enrichment during the supplier onboarding process (2) as a standalone application where clients directly upload their vendor master data for cleansing and validation (3) an API integration to the back-end of the different systems of record. In addition to those three delivery methods, Apex offers smartvm+ as a way for clients to reach out to their suppliers directly to correct any errors or help fill in any data gaps identified by the solution. An additional workflow that automatically engages suppliers to address any issues can be added to any of the three approaches.
Summary
Over the past few years, Apex has invested significantly to develop an advanced solution suite that builds upon its decades-long work tracking supplier transactions and records. Apex is now very clearly a solution to be considered by procurement organizations (and AP/Finance). Apexanalytix’ combination of proprietary supplier data, strong analytics, and highly configurable forms and workflows are among the reasons that they have been named as one of Ardent Partners’ Key Providers in the 2020s.
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