We look at something a little bit different on this week’s show and examine how one startup Founder decided to start his own community of procurement software startups to help to promote his own. To be able to learn from other procurement tech companies and jointly market each other’s solutions at the same time is a great, innovative way to increase attention to your own business. Andreas Zimmermann, CEO of MySupply and Supplytechs joins me to tell his story. How one Founder created a community ...
Feb 02, 2022•33 min•Season 2Ep. 22
We're back with another Pub episode, where we dive a little bit deeper into a topic than we do in our normal podcasts and really break down a hot topic in a more informal chat format. My guest for this one is Prof. Dr. Florian Kleemann. He's a university professor, author of four German language procurement textbooks and also a former consultant. We dive into the topic of how people are a vital factor in change management. A digital transformation project, or orchestrating the changes to make a ...
Jan 26, 2022•53 min•Season 2Ep. 21
On this week’s episode I get to talk to a well-known industry expert and dive into a subject many of you may be confused and excited about in equal measure. Melissa Drew, Associate Partner at IBM is my guest to dive into the topic of use cases for AI in procurement applications. We tackle where we are, where we’re headed and what some of the opportunities and limitations could be for this technology in this space. Use cases, opportunities and limitations of AI in Procurement Melissa starts off b...
Jan 19, 2022•36 min•Season 2Ep. 20
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 years and what direction it’s headed in the future. Spend Analytics: Maintaining relevance and continuo...
Jan 12, 2022•30 min•Season 2Ep. 19
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 digital solution and how they’ve seen benefits since its implementation. Building a digital strategy w...
Jan 05, 2022•39 min•Season 2Ep. 18
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 simple, affordable and easy-to-use procurement software to SMEs: Adam Thomas from oboloo The first qu...
Dec 29, 2021•24 min•Season 2Ep. 17
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 keeping things simple and the hidden value in robust vendor master data. Eliminating admin hassle a...
Dec 22, 2021•33 min•Season 2Ep. 16
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 brief introduction of who we are, and our background. Always good to know how we both got into this...
Dec 15, 2021•54 min•Season 2Ep. 15
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 customers. Using 20 Years of E-Auction Data to Help Customers Gain Competitive Advantage - Henrik Balslev f...
Dec 08, 2021•32 min•Season 2Ep. 14
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 on offer. I spoke to one of their Co-Founders, Nic Martin, to discuss what brought them this far, and...
Dec 01, 2021•26 min•Season 2Ep. 13
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, has created with the Vendorful platform, and he's here to walk us through how this approach can re...
Nov 24, 2021•28 min•Season 2Ep. 12
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 week's guest is Jack MacFarlane, CEO of DeepStream Technologies. They're an e-sourcing platform with ...
Nov 17, 2021•27 min•Season 2Ep. 11
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 just through a traditional e-auction platform. First up, we welcome Tim Grunow and Lukas Wawrla fro...
Nov 10, 2021•27 min•Season 2Ep. 10
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 on what I feel should be the priorities when it comes to digital procurement transformations. I'm a...
Nov 03, 2021•33 min•Season 2Ep. 9
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 niche of digitsing services procurement. Prospeum Philip Rathjen joins me from Prospeum, a pretty new so...
Oct 27, 2021•31 min•Season 2Ep. 8
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 Utilise AI and Game Theory to Deliver their Solution This episode is all about startups who heavily ...
Oct 20, 2021•33 min•Season 2Ep. 7
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 out there who are destined to grow quickly. Hot Digital Procurement and Supply Chain Startups in the...
Oct 13, 2021•33 min•Season 2Ep. 6
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-based startup Lhotse is my guest on this week's show. He explains how their solution helps to simplify t...
Oct 06, 2021•31 min•Season 2Ep. 5
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 on this week's show to break down this not-as-scary-as-it-sounds technology! Using AI to Clean Procur...
Sep 29, 2021•31 min•Season 2Ep. 4
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 collaboration based on mutual trust. Sheldon Mydat, CEO of Suppeco is my guest this week to walk us thr...
Sep 22, 2021•30 min•Season 2Ep. 3
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 Fabian Heinrich from Berlin-based startup Mercanis. They claim to have a solution for both. We dive...
Sep 15, 2021•25 min•Season 2Ep. 2
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 to set up LeanLinking following a successful career in procurement as a Regional Category Manager fo...
Sep 08, 2021•26 min•Season 2Ep. 1
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 them myself way back in 2003)! There are a lot of cool apps out there that are disrupting the old-scho...
Sep 09, 2020•36 min•Season 1Ep. 25
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 Word documents, as well as project updates and meeting minutes on Sharepoint was able to do that to a c...
Sep 02, 2020•32 min•Season 1Ep. 24
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. So, how can data management ever become top of the agenda? My guest today argues that a significant p...
Aug 26, 2020•33 min•Season 1Ep. 23
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 opportunities may be hiding in your spend data. Taking it to a completely new level, the ability to combine s...
Aug 19, 2020•32 min•Season 1Ep. 22
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 Kevin Frechette, CEO and Co-Founder of Fairmarkit, who were recently recognised by Gartner as one of ...
Aug 12, 2020•38 min•Season 1Ep. 21
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 consultant who has over 10 years of experience in the automotive industry. So, it's all the more relev...
Aug 05, 2020•29 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Expenses for items such as individual company mobile phone usage, printing and copaying is typically billed centrally against a centrally negotiated contract. The costs incurred, however, are often both a mystery and black hole of unaudited, unchecked invoices. They needn't be. All organisations can access individual employee expense data if they so wish. The reality is that few of them do. Which is really a lost opportunity, when you consider all of the anomalies, discrepancies and consumption-...
Jul 29, 2020•30 min•Season 1Ep. 19
Larger organisations tend to use enterprise level ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle, neither of which are particularly user-friendly. In fact, the average person who only uses them to request, approve or receive goods and services will usually find them cumbersome to the point that they find ways around them. Organisations typically react to this by offering solutions such as punch-out catalogues and P-cards, or even third-party integrators and BPO to deal with tail spend. Smaller and medium-si...
Jul 22, 2020•34 min•Season 1Ep. 18
