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 Fairmarkit, a solution provider that optimizes the sourcing process for non-strategic spend.
Key Provider in the 2020s – Fairmarkit
With news of its latest round of funding hitting the market last week, it is fair to say that Boston-based, Fairmarkit has arrived. The company focuses on helping procurement teams drive value in their unmanaged tail spend. The company focuses on what it calls the “meat” of an enterprise’s non-strategic spend (or tail spend) by automating an RFP process that puts requisitions that fall below a sourcing team’s threshold for action into an automated, competitive process that can drive savings/value in a light touch way. The result is that a procurement organization can inject new supplier competition into a large part of unmanaged spend, and do so in an efficient and scalable way.
Fairmarkit has developed technology that can analyze a company’s current and historical spend and supplier data, and via integrations with eProcurement and ERP requisitioning platforms, adds a level of automated intelligence to the requisition-to-PO process. The Fairmarkit solution tracks requisitions in real-time, identifies and ranks potential suppliers (utilizing its proprietary database) and then either sends out a bid or makes an immediate award recommendation based upon its customers’ business rules. The system both automates and adds value to the management of spend that falls below a sourcing team’s focus which in many organizations can be as high as the middle six figures. The Fairmarkit leadership team believes that it can add value to very large requisitions all the way down to those at around $500.
Since the Fairmarkit solution integrates with a company’s eProcurement system, a company’s requisition creation process remains the same. Fairmarkit changes what happens once a buyer receives the requisition. When a new requisition comes in for a non-contracted category, the Fairmarkit system will analyze the opportunity and then identify and rank potential suppliers using the company’s historical spend and its own proprietary supplier network. The buyer will then determine how, where, and with whom to share the bid opportunity as well as the rules associated with bid collection (open or closed bid, timing, level of bid details required, etc.) and the award process. The system collects the bids and the buyer makes an award and generates a PO. The level of automation and buyer involvement will depend on the category, the size and scope of the spend, and the procurement team’s policies. As customers become more familiar with the process and the results generated by the Fairmarkit system, they fully automate an increasing number of bids.
While the Fairmarkit solution can be described as lightweight and flexible, it offers robust reporting that can help procurement teams better understand their spend and improve operations. The company has aggressive product development plans for both its buyer and supplier constituencies which will, no doubt, be accelerated by the new injection of money from its latest round of funding. By applying standard procurement best practices via smart machine learning and process automation technology to a frequently overlooked large bucket of enterprise spend, Fairmarkit is a solution provider that is opening new opportunities for procurement departments to create more value. Accordingly, Fairmarkit is one of Ardent Partners’ Key Providers in the 2020s.
RELATED RESEARCH
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20 for 2020: Key Providers in the 2020s – apexanalytix
20 for 2020: Key Providers in the 2020s – Utmost
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