This time of the year is always full of conferences and last week was certainly a whirlwind! Early Tuesday morning I flew down to Amsterdam for Keelvar Konnect and on Wednesday and Thursday I attended DPW in central Amsterdam. Even if the two events were very different in terms of scope and scale, both had great energy and showcased innovation in the procurement technology space.
Keelvar Konnect: Automating Optimization
Keelvar is one of the few remaining eSourcing specialists with its origin and core differentiator in sourcing optimization. Building on its optimization capabilities, Keelvar has over the last five years or so expanded into sourcing automation. In fact, Keelvar was a pioneer in this area when it launched its first sourcing bots. Unfortunately, the first approach Keelvar took to sourcing automation didn’t scale well, so they started over from an architectural point of view and scale back up. Keelvar, together with a growing number of customers, is ramping up usage, with the number of sourcing events on the Keelvar platform increasing by more than 140%! They now have customers running more than 1,000 sourcing events per year. And for one customer, the average time to do a spot RFQ is less than nine minutes from initiation to awarded bid. Impressive performance!
One of the highlights of Keelvar Konnect was a great panel session hosted by Dylan Alperin of Keelvar with Bartosz Kalwinsky from Mars, Hardik Singhvi from Henkel, and Rasmus Nielsen from KK Wind Solutions on scaling sourcing excellence. The panel shared some great insights into the changing role of shared services centers and centers of excellence as self-service capabilities increase. They also talked about the need for integration to drive efficiencies, a theme that also frequently came up at DPW. One of the best panel discussions I’ve listened to in quite some time, and it gave me some input for at least one Magnus Monday article.
After lunch, Keelvar’s new chief product officer, Tara Dixon, shared the product roadmap but asked us to keep it confidential. That said, I got permission to share that Keelvar has launched a beta version of what they call Rate Manager. This product helps procurement organizations keep track of rates (or prices if you’d rather call it that). Not a very complex idea but highly useful in categories with complex rate structures or prices. The idea comes from the logistics world but can be highly useful to keep direct material, packaging, and other prices visible, up to date, and in synch across fragmented ERP landscapes.
Keelvar Konnect is a relatively small event with around 100 attendees and a (obviously) very focused agenda. After a glass of wine or two and some jazz, I headed into central Amsterdam for DPW, an entirely different beast!
DPW: The Biggest Concentration of Procurement Tech in the World?
This was my first time attending DPW and it was about time! I think it’s safe to say that the question mark in the header above is a bit superfluous, because it felt like everyone was here and familiar faces were everywhere. I’m not going to list all the companies and people I spoke to, but instead quickly discuss the three sessions I moderated. Three great discussions on entirely different topics that show the broad and complex scope of procurement.
Market-led Strategies with Unite, Arkema, and Bertrandt
The first panel session was hosted by Unite. Unite (formerly known as Mercateo) is an online B2B marketplace that provides its buying customers with ready-to-use catalogs from approved and vetted suppliers. The platform is fully transparent to suppliers as well, so they can see how competitive their pricing is — thus enabling competition and market forces.
The panel consisted of Karsten Schmidt from Bertrandt, Zafer Girisit from Arkema, and Christel Constant from Unite. We had a great discussion around the efficiency of using a marketplace with approved and vetted suppliers and how their organizations could delegate buying through this channel to the end users and free up time for their procurement organizations.
From Analytics to Actions with Suplari and BT Sourced
The second panel was with Diarmuid O’Donoghue from BT Sourced and Jeff Gerber from Suplari. Suplari is a spend analytics solution that helps BT Sourced (the procurement company of telecom giant BT) aggregate, classify, analyze, and get insight into their spend. Diarmuid shared some of the actionable insights BT Sourced are getting from Suplari and how it drives value for them. The session really highlighted how fundamental spend analytics are and how next-gen analytics don’t just provide a spend cube but can actually surface actionable recommendations.
Rethinking the Stakeholder Experience with Zip and Arm
My third panel was with Sean Park of Arm and Nick Heinzmann of Zip. Zip is an intake management and procurement process orchestration platform, you can find more about Zip here and here. This discussion was centered on leveraging technology (in this case Zip) to transform procurement in general and the stakeholder experience specifically.
Takeaways and Lessons Learnt
My key takeaway is that innovation is very much alive and kicking in the procurement technology space. More innovation has happened in the last five years than the previous 20 or so … IM&PPO, autonomous (even if I prefer to call it automated) sourcing, and category management solutions have redefined existing or even created entire new categories of solutions. And I haven’t even mentioned AI … DPW had something like 120 sponsors, many that I’ve never heard of before (a bit humbling considering my job). Many of these won’t make it on their own, as they are too niche. But even so, there is no shortage of ideas or opportunities out there.
Looking back at these intense days, there are a couple of lessons:
- Book a later flight home, too many companies, sessions, and people to meet to fly out in the afternoon. Next year I’ll stay until Friday!
- Bring comfier shoes, lots of walking and standing. The sneaker recommendation is on point, definitely wearing a pair next year.
As the conference season continues, I’ll be in Las Vegas for SAP Spend Connect this week and I’m sure I’ll meet some of you there!
As always, if you have any questions, Ardent Partners is here to help!
