At the start of 2022, digital procurement solution provider, Simfoni announced that it had acquired EC Sourcing Group, a longstanding and prominent provider of strategic sourcing solutions. The deal enables the company to a offer comprehensive strategic sourcing suite that combines Simfoni’s core spend intelligence module with EC Sourcing’s strategic sourcing platform, that included a strong suite that includes, eSourcing, contracts, and sourcing optimization. To get an update on the year and its combined suite of solutions and services, the Ardent Partners team recently sat down with Kyle Muskoff, Simfoni’s vice president of sales and Trish McLoughlin, head of marketing.
Global Beginnings
Founded in 2015, Simfoni began as a global company with operations in both Dubai and London. Today, the company is led by Chirang Shah, founder and executive chairman and two industry veteran CEOs: Ron Emma, co-founder and CEO – eSourcing (and former CEO of EC Sourcing), and David Bush, CEO – Spend Automation. Currently, there are more than 100 employees working across 29 countries.
With its international beginning, Simfoni has been able to build a strong presence in Europe and the Middle East with a global customer base now approaching 200. On the heels of the acquisition, the company has experienced strong growth in 2022, particularly in North America as its combined offerings continue to gain traction. Muskoff says Simfoni covers nearly every region in the world and counts VISA and IKEA as the company’s marquee customers, with Compass Foods and Dulsco as large customers in the Middle East.
To Infinity and Beyond
Muskoff says that Simfoni’s mission is to help businesses place more spend under management and offers both managed services and a trio of interconnected solutions designed to help its customers do just that. The company’s three solution segments (presented within an infinity symbol) include:
- Spend Analytics Engine
- Strategic Spend Terminal
- Spend Automation
Spend Analytics Engine. Muskoff says analytics sits at the core of all of Simfoni’s offerings because “without visibility into your spend, you can’t make any other good decisions. That’s where we always start.” Driving the spend analytics engine is the ability to automatically extract data from client back-end systems, cleanse, and auto-classify it for clients, something Simfoni typically performs for its clients on a weekly or monthly basis. Muskoff says Simfoni’s machine learning helps capture data at the line level and continually improves the classification process and final results. More importantly, he says that Simfoni’s unique middleware capabilities enable this process to be essentially “hands-free” with refreshes performed automatically and that “when you partner these capabilities together, you get highly efficient, hands-off data processing, coupled with immediate access to the data.” The Engine can also include a series of prepackaged reports or “opportunity identifiers” like risk management, pay term analysis, and supplier diversity that are provided as add-ons to the core analytics tool.
Strategic Spend Terminal. Combining spend analytics with an e-sourcing suite, the Strategic Spend Terminal (Simfoni’s name for its strategic sourcing offering) allows customers to identify sourcing opportunities with spand analysis and then execute them using a fully-automated process. The former EC Sourcing solution included a robust, competitive eSourcing and auctions to, while Muskoff highlighted the strength of its optimization capabilities. For example, rules can be established to award business based upon any number of factors and that “with established rules, the bid optimization tool can recommend what set of quotes to accept that apply to those rules,” he says. Notably the company offers the “terminal” as a standard technology subscription model but that the company is “now moving to package it with managed services as an added value to clients.”
Spend Automation. This solution is designed to serve mature and developing procurement organizations alike. Mature organizations with P2P solutions in place can leverage Simfoni’s tail spend solution to place more spend under management, while those without a P2P system can use Simfoni’s procurement-in-box offering.
Tail Spend Management
Muskoff says his company believes that an offering that blends services and technology to manage tail spend will deliver more comprehensive coverage and ultimately, superior results. Accordingly, Simfoni combines three common approaches to this problem spend area:
(1) a managed service
(2) a front-end RFQ engine to manage the tail spend directly
(3) a technology solution (“One Vendor”) that streamlines the management of tail spend vendors through an external system.
“It’s a complex offering that we try to make as simple as possible with a light technology footprint that is integrated directly into their procure-to-pay system — all wrapped within a managed service,” he says. And, since tail spend tends to be more localized, Muskoff says their team of global resources can plug in quickly.
Procurement-in-a-Box
This offering supports organizations that lack the bandwidth to manage a procure-to-pay operation. Muskoff says Simfoni brings both the technology and support services needed to drive a successful P2P operation. “We’re going to provide the change management to roll out the system and maintain it, while also providing the procurement expertise to ensure you’re capturing savings,” he says.
Muskoff adds that the Simfoni platform is more than the typical source-to-pay solution because it’s wrapped with managed services, specifically procurement expertise. “We want to bring this white glove experience to our clients. It goes beyond simply selling software but really being there everyday from a change management and procurement expertise standpoint,” Muskoff says. “We are relationship driven and are tied into our client’s success because we’re an extended part of their category management team.” Simfoni stands behind the value it can deliver by offering customers a “pay as you save” commercial model across its offerings.
Summary
With almost a full year of operation as combined entity under the day-to-day leadership of two savvy industry leaders, Ron Emma and Dave Bush, Simfoni is making real strides in the market with its unique combination of technology solution and managed services that cut across the full scope of procurement operations. In the near-term, the company recently launched its “terminal” dashboard it continues to invest resources in enhancing the current suite integration. Looking ahead, Muskoff does not rule out other complementary acquisitions. As the packaging of its solutions becomes clearer and more streamlined, 2023 looks promising for Simfoni.
RELATED RESEARCH
eSourcing and Advanced Sourcing Technologies in Today’s Market
The Intersection of Data and Sourcing
Creating a Business Case for Sourcing Automation – Executive Summary
Technology Round-up – February 18, 2022
