SAP held its annual Spend Connect conference (previously known as SAP Ariba Live) in Vienna, Austria from October 9 to 11, where they graciously hosted the Spend Matters team to get the latest on product announcements and catch up with clients and SAP executives (you can catch the “best of” follow-up here). The event illuminated both the firm’s strategic intents and tactical efforts (e.g., GenAI). We’ll cover the announcements made at the event and publish some follow-on insights to address “under the hood” progress on integrating the firm’s app/platform portfolio and integration with customer tech stacks and the broader tech partner ecosystem (e.g., EcoVadis, Fairmarkit, Scoutbee, ZIP and others). Here are some specific highlights from the event.
Cost reduction and value creation have ballooned in importance of late for the procurement professional, and the most direct method for addressing both is to increase the efficiency and efficacy of procurement via the adoption of dedicated source-to-pay and/or spend management platforms. This is why, when participating in
Throughout the year our analyst team provides vendor-specific profiles and tech solution analyses as part of Spend Matters Insider content. Our coverage also explores the latest thought leadership topics about procurement and supply, the technology that serves it and comparative analyses based on demos and the scoring of 500+ RFI requirements across 12 source-to-pay (S2P) categories that create our Vendor Ranking data. In this roundup of Q3, we review the Vendor Analyses and other Insider content that the team produced in the previous quarter. We then look ahead to what members can expect in the coming months.
Continuing our series of analyst observations on procurement tech market movements, this week we are considering the development of dark web monitoring as a tool in cyber supply chain risk management. “During a recent product demo,” Meena Ibrahim, Spend Matters Research Analyst, recalls, “a supplier intelligence provider mentioned its partnership with a platform that uses the dark web to uncover supply chain risk.” What made this interesting was that there are vendors that provide supplier data management and risk protection for supplier data, but relatively few of them actively scrape the dark web for sensitive information. This is despite the years of examples for why procurement needs a more proactive cyber supply chain risk management (C-SCRM) strategy.
Continuing our series of analyst observations on procurement tech market movements, this week we are considering how technology serves as an enabler for procurement to expand from purely occupying a savings role to an orchestrating one.