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 Scout RFP, a Workday company, which recently announced its new name – Workday Strategic Sourcing – along with some organizational changes as well. Note that the briefing was held prior to the recent name change and this article refers to Scout and Workday Strategic Sourcing.
Workday Strategic Sourcing: Making eSourcing Fun Again
As a 20+year proponent of all things eSourcing, I was very pleased when Workday decided to acquire Scout RFP Last November (click to read our coverage). Workday is cloud-based ERP offering financial and human capital management solutions. The deal proved that innovative approaches and solutions can still succeed in relatively mature solution markets. In the world of procurement, the eSourcing and strategic sourcing technology market(s) are fairly mature with the majority of market share spread across a few longstanding providers. Scout was able to enter and shake up this fairly staid industry in a relatively short period of time. The founding team was rewarded with a successful buyout, but remains in place, more committed than ever to push the industry forward in how it thinks about eSourcing and strategic sourcing more broadly. The newly rebranded solution suite now serves as foundation that Workday is using to pursue procurement organizations with a full source-to-pay offering. Workday reports that it now has more than 1,000 procurement customers using its spend management solutions which includes users of the acquired Scout offering.
Fast Growth Continues in 2020
Like many providers, 2020 has been a very strong year for the Workday Strategic Sourcing team with the pandemic driving greater interest in process automation tools across the full source-to-settle process, particularly for larger organizations after the first month or two of the shutdown. The team has also benefited from the sales and marketing resource expansion after the acquisition and the ability to target the large Workday customer base. New sales and deployments are up significantly in 2020 as a result. Another interesting piece of the company’s growth story this year is the expansion of current customers to begin using more Workday Strategic Sourcing applications. And, as more customers expand out from eSourcing and begin to use more of the strategic sourcing suite, usage and throughput column in the entire suite has skyrocketed with all applications showing sizable year-over-year growth in usage. As of September, the company was supporting almost half a million users and more than 270K suppliers.
Product Innovation Across the Strategic Sourcing Suite
While Scout’s success was primarily based upon its eSourcing solution, the company has quietly, but steadily developed a suite of strategic sourcing applications and continued to invest in enhancing them with more than 160 new features released in the past year. The largest of these include:
- A new homepage designed to help users centralize and better manage the tasks, activities, and workflows across the source-to-contract process for themselves and their teams, including more robust notifications within the solution.
- Unifying its supplier management solutions including onboarding, risk, and performance management with Workday’s vendor master. This includes the aggregation of sourcing and purchasing (if using Workday’s eProcurement) transactional data to provide a better view into supplier relationships. Suppliers now have the ability to share their profiles with other customers across the Workday sourcing platform.
- Enhance contract creation and collaboration including an improved clause library, stronger workflows, and tighter linkages to sourcing bid data.
- Sourcing enhancements including new advanced sourcing bid analysis capabilities which enable the use of award scenarios; customizable, user-based navigation enhancements, and a stakeholder feedback loop to improve bid evaluations and award decision-making.
- Better integration of the acquired Scout strategic sourcing suite with the Workday procure-to-pay offering.
Key Solution Provider for 2020s – Workday Strategic Sourcing
Having attended multiple Scout “Spark” user conferences in recent years, I can attest to the genuine level of enthusiasm that its customers share and the company’s fast growth post last year’s acquisition points to a promising future. Workday Strategic Sourcing and the team behind it has helped reinvigorate the space and make eSourcing fun again. Workday Strategic Sourcing is one of Ardent Partners’ Key Providers in the 2020s.
RELATED RESEARCH
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Scout RFP Receives Series C Funding to Drive Further Growth in 2019
