The Ardent Partners analyst team descended on Nashville on May 3rd and 4th 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.”
Over the last few weeks, we’ve shared dispatches from various sessions attended at the event. Be sure to check out our previous Ivalua dispatches in the “Related Research” section at the end of this article.
Breakout Session: Successfully Unlocking Agility Within Procurement by CACI
Today’s fourth and final dispatch from the ivalua NOW 2023 event features moderator Vishal Patel, vice president of product marketing for Ivalua, and William Mertz, vice president of supply chain for CACI, and their breakout session “Successfully Unlocking Agility Within Procurement.”
The focus of the session dealt with how CACI streamlined operations with modern, digital technology that allows quick adaptation — unlocking immense value for the business.
Mertz has been with CACI for 12 years and spent the last few establishing the enterprise supply chain organization. The company is a leading provider of expertise and technology to government enterprises and mission customers. A $6.2 billion company, it acquires approximately two businesses per year.
Ivalua’s Tight Platform Integration with CACI
The journey with Ivalua began 10 years ago when CACI implemented Ivalua’s platform and all its modules from supplier management to sourcing requisitioning to agreements, ordering, and invoicing all in one place for internal users, buyers, subcontractors, and even suppliers to leverage. The platform is tightly integrated with CACI’s ERP and contract management systems.
Because of the nature of its products and services, if a government contract includes a national security need, the contract management system will feed contract data into the TAs and NDAs creating a D-Pass Rating that bumps the contract to the top of the line for CACI’s suppliers. This data is included throughout every phase of the order process automatically alerting suppliers that it’s D-Pass Rated and giving it priority.
Agility Means Opportunity
When Mertz thinks of agility, the first word that comes to mind is opportunity. Prior to partnering with Ivalua, the enterprise dictated what procurement was going to do. Since then, based on the value created in such a short time, the organization now seeks conversations and input on solutions, as well as new value-added opportunities. Mertz credits the businesses’ integrated end-to-end platform to quickly solve complex problems. Getting to that point begins with digital transformation where there’s both leadership support and change adoption. However, the transformation doesn’t end at implementation, it’s continuous.
CACI’s agility was put to the test when it was announced that procurement’s resources were moving out of state to a shared service center and would require all new hires. All purchasing and federal subcontracting would occur at the new shared service center. Mertz and his team worked diligently with the Ivalua platform to configure the workflows and modules to put the warnings, blocks, and gates in place at each step of the process. Within three months, 60 positions were filled and all staff were trained using the company’s Procurement Bible that resides throughout the Ivalua platform. The shared service center has now been operational for five years — unprecedented for federal subcontracting in that type of environment.
What’s on the horizon for CACI? Cybersecurity is front and center, a must for any enterprise involved in federal contracting. Also, creating a central hub for all subcontracting documentation is critical as well. From a supply chain perspective, product lifecycle management and utilizing an engineering BOM management tool rolled out for all CACI products and businesses is a near-term goal.
Overall, leveraging new tools is a focus going forward. Mertz said an initiative using robotic process automation and the Ivalua platform was successful in ensuring the correct data elements from lengthy government contracts were being extracted. RPA and optical character recognition made automating that process a reality. The integration with Ivalua’s platform is helping turn must-haves into reality.
RELATED RESEARCH
Ivalua NOW 2023 – Dispatch #1: CEO Keynote
Ivalua NOW 2023 – Dispatch #2: From PROcurement to PREcurement: Managing the Evolution
Ivalua NOW 2023 – Dispatch #3: Managing Supply Chains in the Age of Volatility
Ivalua NOW 2022: We Are Stronger Together
IvaluaNow: Enabling Procurement’s Role in Carbon Reduction
Honeywell @IvaluaNow: Rethinking Procurement for Today’s World
