The Ardent Partners analyst team descended on Nashville last week for the ivalua NOW 2023: Americas conference. This event was well-attended and came on the heels of the company’s slightly larger EMEA conference which was held in Paris at the end of March. Ivalua typically selects unique venues for its annual user conferences and this year was no different with the event taking place in the Country Music Hall of Fame and included field trips to the Grand Ole Opry and Gibson’s Garage.
It has been 10 years since Ardent first attended (and participated) in ivalua’s annual event back in 2013 and it has been a pretty impressive decade of growth and innovation for the company. Ivalua reached many major milestones over the past year which included: passing 900 total employees, exceeding $150 million dollars in annual revenues, supporting almost 1500 certified ivalua consultants, and launching the “Environmental Impact Center.”
CEO Keynote: “Welcome to the Age of Uncertainty”
As he did in 2013 (and done each year since), CEO David Khut-Duy came to the stage and delivered the day’s first keynote with a discussion that covered the company, its solutions and customers, and his views on the procurement industry. David began by welcoming us to the “age of uncertainty,” a time when uncertainty is prevalent and shows no signs of ever diminishing. While these have been difficult days (and years), David believes that procurement is well-positioned to help reduce that uncertainty and deliver great value; but to do so, procurement must keep pace with the fast-changing world. To keep pace, procurement must work differently (and better).
For example, David believes that new supplier strategies are needed which could (and from Ardent’s perspective probably should) include nearshoring. It also means a new approach to supplier information management, specifically the ability to capture, track and manage new requirements like ESG reporting. And, it also means finding new ways to engage current stakeholders and new ways to collaborate with new stakeholders.
When David founded ivalua more than 20 years ago, the classic “people, process, and technology paradigm was supreme. Over time, David says that he has come to understand that people and technology are quite inseparable. And to that end, it is his view that digital transformation will make supply chains “more efficient, sustainable and resilient” while unlocking the value of supplier collaboration.
David then presented his “big picture” view on enterprise technology. As enterprises continue to consolidate their technology now and in the future, their solutions will start to fall into four primary buckets:
- Finance
- Employees
- Customers
- Suppliers
This is an idea that has been around for some time (albeit in different variations), but it places supplier/spend management on par with the other large technology packages (which can be either suites or ERPs) used within the enterprise. This idea also aligns very well with ivalua’s overall mission to allow its customers to manage 100% of its spend and 100% of its suppliers on a single platform. One of the things that allows ivalua to stand out in the market today is its unique ability to help its customers manage direct materials spend. As such, David believes that ivalua’s unified platform can serve as the backbone to strategic procurement operations, by offering “flexibility AND best-of-breed capabilities” while delivering value quickly.
David says that ivalua is a company that cares for its customers, employees, and the environment; its customer retention rate averages between 95% and 99%, so it is clearly doing something right.
David thinks the future looks bright and says that his company will focus on a few innovation areas this year including
- Environment Impact Management
- Community Management
- Invoice Management
- Continuous transaction Control
- User Adoption.
It is a great thing to have dreams, says David but it’s the planners that make the dreams come true. In recent years, David has assembled a very strong team of dreamers and planners; I would not be surprised if ivalua today has surpassed the early dreams of David and his co-founders.
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