The Procurement Software Podcast

I’m joined today on the Procuretech Podcast by Sammeli Sammalkorpi, CEO of Sievo, one of the stalwarts of the spend analytics space. The well-known Finnish company were actually founded almost 19 years ago!  During this time, what started out as a simple spend analysis tool has grown to be a comprehensive best-of-breed solution for spend analytics. We discuss how this niche has matured over the ye...

This week on the podcast I’m joined by two guests, because we’re actually going to be talking about a customer success story on the show. Børge Langedal, Co-Founder and CRO of Norwegian spend analytics, vendor and category management tool Ignite Procurement joins me together with Arndt Romer from their German customer SEG Automotive. We dive into how and why SEG Automotive chose Ignite as their di...

How big does a business need to be before they can afford procurement software? And how many features does the software need to have to still enable it to deliver value? My guest today is Adam Thomas from a small but growing startup oboloo. Based in London, the company is focused on delivering a practical source-to-contract software solution to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). Providing s...

Some of the irritations that procurement professionals face in their daily work are very easily avoidable. With a bit of thought and the right software platform, a lot of busywork and unnecessary admin can be eliminated or simplified. One such example is the vendor intake process. My guest this week is Nick Verkroost, COO of vendor onboarding and master data management solution OCG Software, about...

Enterprise suites vs. Best-of-Breed is a long-standing and hotly debated topic. This week's episode is an edit of a LinkedIn Live session that I did with Nico. If you'd like to see this on video, just head across to The Procuretech Podcast Page on LinkedIn and watch the complete live stream! The ongoing debate between Best-of-Breed vs. Enterprise Suites: Which solution is best? We start off with a...

Our final episode in our mini-series of e-Sourcing platforms brings us to a well-estalished provider who has been in the space for over 20 years. So, during the interview with Henrik Balslev, CCO of Danish Source-to-Contract (S2C) software Scanmarket, the most obvious thing to talk about was all of the data they've collected since they've been offering e-auctions and RFx solutions to their custome...

A tool that's easy to use and affordable, but also very versatile in terms of what it can do and the add-ons that go with it. We continue our mini-series of e-sourcing solutions today with Market Dojo. They've grown a feature rich e-sourcing tool that is offered as a simple, pay monthly software but also comes with many different additional modules to complement the core RFx / e-auction software o...

We're back with the third in our 5-part series on e-sourcing platforms, and this week we're looking at how e-sourcing can fit into a wider scope covered by a software solution. How can an e-sourcing requirement be married together with upstream and downstream features to create a mini-suite centred around vendor management, with e-sourcing at its core? This is what my guest this week, David Wadler...

On this week's episode, we explore a topic that is becoming ever more important when it comes to selecting a piece of software in the B2B space. Adoption and acceptance of procurement technology within an organisation is highly dependent on a software's user experience and ease of use. And yet very little is spoken about this when we look at review sites and awards for procurement software. This w...

This week we kick off a mini-series of 5 podcasts on e-sourcing software. On the one hand, this is a mature market, with lots of established players. Indeed, many of the larger suites started out as auction platforms back in the day. But this is now being challenged by fresh thinking and new technology, especially as businesses realise that there are way more possibilities to drive value here than...

The Lowdown on Spend Matters 50 To Know / 50 To Watch and the ProcureTech100 This week is a solo episode. I rarely do them, and I thought long and hard before publishing this. At the end of the day, I'm just one person who has a keen interest in digital procurement technology. I'm not an academic or a researcher, but I do take a passionate interest in what is out there and I have some strong views...

We’re back with the final part of our 3-part series of live episodes recorded at Procurement Summit in Berlin on 29 and 30 September 2021. Each podcast features a different theme, focusing on some of the newer, less well-known startups who pitched and exhibited during the summit. This final episode looks at 3 solutions out there who have doubled down on tackling the lucrative and under-served nich...

We’re back with part 2 of a 3 part series of live episodes recorded at Procurement Summit in Berlin on 29 and 30 September 2021. Each podcast features a different theme, focusing on some of the newer, less well-known startups who pitched and exhibited during the summit to bring awareness to some of the exciting new players out there who have a bright future. Hot Digital Procurement Startups which...

This week, we bring you the first in a 3 part series of live episodes recorded at Procurement Summit in Berlin on 29 and 30 September 2021. We’ll be covering a different theme on each episode, and featuring 3 procuretech startups each week. Our focus is on some of the newer, less well-known startups who pitched and exhibited during the summit to bring awareness to some of the exciting new players...

Tactical, non-strategic spend is a time suck to pretty much every organisation, regardless of their size. Managing this through traditional channels - i.e. ERP systems - is a cumbersome process for both the procurement professional who has to manage it, and the stakeholder who just wants a simple, user-friendly interface to be able to buy something. Henning Hatje, Co-Founder and CEO of Berlin-base...

AI is a term that often scares anyone who is not familiar with the technology and the application. In this episode, we're going to cover some of the different use cases for AI in the procurement space, and then dive into master data as a specific case study. Adriano Garibotto, Co-Founder and Chief Sales & Marketing Officer of Italian procurement data management company Creactives is my guest o...

Business relationships at their heart are all about people, when you put the commercials, the products or services, and the mechanism or process used to manage those relationships to one side. Managing people-to-people relationships, whether with stakeholders or suppliers, through email chains and Excel sheets isn't particularly effective. Especially when it comes to continuity and longer term col...

Historically, there wasn't much technology out there to deal with indirect services spend, both from a sourcing and supplier contract lifecycle management perspective. This has started to change recently. But is it possible to manage both strategic, corporate level service agreements as well as more tactical, tail spend and one-time buys all in the same platform? My guest on this week's podcast is...

We're BACK! We kick off series 2 of The Procuretech Podcast with with a mini-series examining three different Supplier Relationship Management platforms. The first one we're taking a closer look at is Danish startup LeanLinking, and my guest on this week's show is their CEO, Lars Kuch Pedersen. Why supplier performance data can't just be measured in hard KPIs Lars begins by explaining how he came...

Innovation never stops. Alongside the tools that are making manual processes digital, there are also a new breed of tools which are fundamentally changing the way we go about our job. How we structure and carry out tenders hasn’t really changed much over the last 20 years. E-sourcing tools have been around since the late 1990s, and have been pretty mainstream for the past 15 or so years (I used th...

There are lots of options out there for software to facilitate and digitise our P2P processes, perform e-sourcing or manage our contracts more effectively. However, the surprising omission up until recently was having something that gets us out of our inboxes. Procurement still relies heavily on email, and the volume we receive means that important stuff can easily be missed. Storing Excel and Wor...

The topic of data is like a boomerang. It always seems to come back into every discussion when we get into the nuts and bolts of implementing a digital transformation in procurement or even just implementing a software solution to get more visibility into spend analytics. Problem is, investing in it often doesn't yield a visible payback that can be directly tracked to a future P&L statement. S...

Understanding what you spend is the most important part of strategic procurement. Without this, you can't do much else. You're shooting in the wind, not really knowing whether what you're tackling are the ripest opportunities. While spend analysis tools have been around for a while, they're now becoming old hat. The new generation provides spend analytics and guides you to where the best opportuni...

Tail spend is a huge, untapped opportunity that you're probably not exploiting to its full potential. If you're following the 80/20 rule, then managing the tail isn't going to be a key priority when it comes to resource allocation. Meaning a lot of opportunity goes to waste. Especially if headcount is being cut and procurement teams are having to deal with bigger workloads. My guest this week is K...

Buying smart, and measuring total value rather than just price, is a popular concept right now. And for good reason, given the supply chain fragilities that the Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare. Nonetheless, the automotive industry is one that's renowned for being particularly cutthroat in its often combative relationships with suppliers. My guest on today's show, Dr. Gisela Linge, is a strategy co...