CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up Series returns today with fresh supply management technology news and updates covering a few recent major announcements. If you are a sourcing, procurement, or spend management solution provider and you are continually innovating the way that procurement and supply chain leaders and practitioners drive value, we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a note at info at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!
Raindrop Builds on Its Early Success
When faced with the question of how much money is spent with suppliers, organizations often have difficulty finding the answer. Solving that problem is Raindrop, a spend management solutions provider. Ardent Partners sat down with Ward Karson, co-founder and COO of Raindrop, to discuss the company and its growth trajectory.
Raindrop was born from a procurement services organization when Karson and other co-founders decided to expand beyond people and processes and into the spend management tools arena. Karson said that existing solutions had changed little over the last several years. What he and his team envisioned in July 2019 was a market disruptor in the form of heavy industrial-grade enterprise-class software.
Many of Raindrop’s team members have years of procurement experience, giving the company a unique vantage point of what the market is missing from a spend management solution. “The problem we identified is a simple one: everyone is using different systems, whether it’s multiple ERP or contract management systems — often due to mergers and acquisitions. The result is information loss, such as data, spend, and compliance leakage, raising your risk profile,” said Karson. “What we sought to create was a single pane of glass environment capable of identifying every supplier a company does business with and the data around those relationships.”
The Raindrop solution, a browser-based SaaS-created software built atop Google Cloud, provides real-time intelligence into spend, contracts, supplier performance, and risk. With five modules focused on: 1) Spend and Contract Intelligence, 2) Suppliers, 3) Sourcing, 4) Contracts, and 5) Payables, Raindrop provides a unified user experience that prides itself on faster time to value and ease of use.
Specifically, Karson provides some examples of the solution’s functionality.
- The amount companies are spending on their suppliers in every respect.
- All contractual obligations that exist as well as possible terminations and the party responsible for those contracts based on commodity.
- Supplier qualification and evaluation needs.
- Onboarding and offboarding of suppliers and the ability to automate the process.
- Tracking of diversity, equity, and inclusion with all suppliers.
Currently, Raindrop has approximately 70 customers (ranging from startups to $5 billion in revenue enterprises), many in the retail space. “There are many examples where customers tell us what they need, and we’re able to quickly extend existing functionality or develop it from the ground up,” said Karson. “That’s why our product has become incredibly competitive from a feature functionality and empower capability perspective. The value proposition is significant.”
Proactis Announces Proactis Rego — A Powerful Source-to-Pay Software Platform
WETHERBY, England — Proactis, a source-to-pay solution provider, has introduced Proactis Rego, a powerful spend management software platform specifically designed for mid-market organizations.
The company states that the modular nature of Proactis Rego enables customers to tackle sourcing, procure-to-pay, accounts payable automation, or any other part of the source-to-pay process in isolation, rather than as part of a much wider-ranging, and costly, process.
According to Geert Timmermans, Chief Product Officer at Proactis, “We have developed Proactis Rego to help organizations maximize wider control, visibility, and efficiency. Mid-market organizations have a unique set of challenges. Typically, they have Source-to-Pay processes that are heavily manual or partly automated with a mix of in-house or wider external systems,” said Timmermans.
“Yet as mid-market businesses tend to change quickly, they need to be agile and adapt their systems to accommodate change. Proactis Rego is a modular platform that allows organizations to adapt according to need,” he adds.
Read the full announcement here.
Sievo Announces $44 Million Growth Investment
HELSINKI & CHICAGO — Sievo, a procurement analytics SaaS provider for data-driven enterprises, announced the company raised $44 million in growth investment from Susquehanna Growth Equity (“SGE”). SGE is an entrepreneur-centric growth equity firm exclusively focused on software and information services.
The partnership marks Sievo’s first institutional investment since our founding in 2003. In conjunction with the transaction, Ben Weinberg and Aneesha Raghunathan from SGE will join Sievo’s Board of Directors.
According to Sammeli Sammalkorpi, CEO and Co-Founder of Sievo, “In just the last few years, there have been substantial supply chain shocks emerging from several events such as Covid 19, the conflict in Ukraine, an increasing focus on ESG-centric business practices, and the recent rise of inflation,” he said.
“Companies cannot predict every event – but the companies that are quickest and most strategic to react and make the right decisions will have the competitive advantage against slower-moving peers. The dire need among enterprises for faster and deeper data and analytics could not be more apparent amid the current environment,” Sammalkorpi added.
Read the full announcement here.
LiveHire Launches “Thrive” Global Partner Ecosystem
MIAMI — LiveHire Ltd., a global software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform connecting companies and candidates, announced the launch of the global Thrive Partner Network, bringing together leading technologies and service providers to deliver total talent acquisition and direct sourcing solutions with an award-winning candidate experience for hiring teams and candidates.
According to Dave Ghosh, Senior Vice President, Global Alliances and Channel Sales at LiveHire, “The LiveHire Thrive Partner ecosystem and alliances is designed to drive innovation through strong collaboration with leading organizations and expand the capabilities of the platform and tools that hiring teams use regularly,” said Ghosh.
“The partner network will create a positive impact on the lives of candidates and hiring teams as they attract, engage and recruit talent using one unified platform for unprecedented recruiting excellence,” he added.
The company states that the LiveHire Thrive Partner Network brings three types of formal partners together.
Technology Partners that provide bespoke products that optimize the recruitment process and solve unique HR and business needs.
Transformation Partners that support clients to help with HR and digital transformation projects, implementing direct sourcing technologies and to achieve their hiring goals.
RPOs/MSPs/Curation Partners are an essential and integral part of delivering a talent pipeline, leveraging the employer brand for private talent pools, or building public talent pools with dedicated talent curation services.
Read the full announcement here.
Beeline Announces New Experience Providing Contingent Talent with Full Control Over Personal Data
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Beeline, a provider of solutions for sourcing and managing the global extended workforce, announced an upcoming talent experience enabling contingent workers to create a private account and take full control of how they are represented in the workforce, allowing them to self-report and maintain their own PII (personally identifiable information).
According to Colleen Tiner, SVP Product Strategy for Beeline, “Talent is central to the extended workforce and individual privacy is paramount in the workplace. Our new experience will enable talent to take an active role in the process and trust that their data is protected,” said Tiner.
“Additionally, establishing this trusted relationship directly with workers increases the accuracy of data collected, which means companies can truly measure and understand diversity in the context of their recruitment process and active workforce,” she adds.
Read the full announcement here.
WorkLLama and Checkr Announce Partnership to Bring Efficiencies at Scale for Onboarding Talent
ALPHARETTA, Ga. — WorkLLama, technology provider of a total talent acquisition and engagement suite, announced it has successfully partnered and is fully integrated and certified with Checkr, an AI-driven background check automation platform, to deliver a faster, more robust way to onboard talent.
Together, the two organizations will offer an integrated background check process for seamless, efficient onboarding and a superior, inclusive candidate experience. This will dramatically reduce time-to-hire and offer efficiencies at scale for staffing agencies and the enterprise.
According to Sudhakar Maruvada, CEO and Founder of WorkLLama, “We are pleased to partner with Checkr and their advanced background check technology to elevate the candidate journey for all talent and dramatically reduce time-to-hire for the enterprise. Our robust integration delivers a modernized mechanism to engage and onboard workers,” he said.
Read the full announcement here.
