2023 ProcureTech100 - Strategy, Process & Performance
Solutions that offer a simplified user interface and enable a seamless end-to-end user journey through process orchestration are being seen as game-changers.
Solutions that offer Conversational AI - as a means to interact with users starting their journey or in need of support - are excelling in the market.
The strategy, process and performance category covers solutions that are improving Procurement processes, alongside operational and performance management.
This year has witnessed a shift towards solutions that provide decision intelligence, including data aggregation, visualisation, and automation. This is crucial for driving Procurement strategy and improving overall performance.
In research conducted earlier this year, it was revealed that an overwhelming 78% of Procurement leaders believe that data-driven intelligence has had a positive impact on an organisation’s ability to be reactive.
Similarly, over 90% see optimising cost and cashflow and improving compliance and risk as important drivers of their data-driven decision intelligence investments, and 84% assert that data intelligence has enabled increased savings performance, thanks to the clearer identification and delivery of opportunities.
Meanwhile, process mining solutions are being proven to be very robust, with the ability to handle complex data sets. These solutions will achieve even more impressive results, as organisations work to establish more mature process analysts and data sets.
There is increasing emphasis on sustainability and ESG factors in Procurement, and solutions that track and manage sustainability goals are highly valued. In fact, our recent research revealed that 67% of respondents believe that digitalisation has had either some, a high, or an extreme impact on achieving greater sustainability in Procurement.
Another area where developments are falling behind is the strategy and planning space. This year has seen slower innovation in this sphere, which is most likely due to the consolidation of solutions, and the precedence of stronger business cases being adopted by corporates.
“The combination of game-changing digital capabilities (most notably GenAI and process orchestration) is finally delivering the UX vision for Procurement leaders.” Michael Rooney, Principal, ProcureTech
Founded: 2021
Company HQ: Germany
The SaaS platform for collaborative strategic Procurement
akirolabs is an award-winning AI-powered platform, designed to elevate Procurement from a tactical function to a strategic business partner orchestrating value chains. Its cutting-edge solution enables the self-sufficient development of Procurement strategies, providing a ready-to-use framework that organisations can adapt to their unique needs and contexts.
Its comprehensive category strategy management solution brings traditional category management to new heights, by leveraging AI, fostering extended collaboration, and utilising data from multiple sources and extending it beyond category taxonomy.
Founded: 2011
Company HQ: Germany
Supplying enterprise-ready process mining services
Celonis is the leader in execution management systems, lifting barriers to execution capacity to maximise business performance. Its process intelligence platform takes the data from the systems that Procurement is already using, and presents users with a living digital twin of their end-to-end processes.
Founded: 2009
Company HQ: Austria
Make category strategies actionable
Cirtuo is the pioneer in digital category management and strategy creation. Based on the original consulting blueprint for category management and refined in countless client workshops, Cirtuo distils the insights from hundreds of category strategies - across global and local Procurement organisations and spend categories - into one digital consultant: Cirtuo Guided Strategy Creation.
Cirtuo's systematic and standardised framework for category management - combined with access to real-time market intelligence and AI-powered recommendations - enables Procurement to better translate business requirements and supply market realities into holistic category strategies. By guiding category managers with interview-style questions from demand analysis to strategy creation, Cirtuo empowers faster and more robust decisions that help Procurement mitigate risks, increase efficiency and unlock hidden savings.
Founded: 2013
Company HQ: USA
Optimising customer and employee experiences
Kore.ai has become the trusted partner of over 400 global enterprises, delivering exceptional automation and customer engagement. For five consecutive years, it has been the market leader in conversational and generative AI.
With nearly a decade of experience to its name, Kore.ai is working to unlock the full power of AI, and define the future of experience.
Founded: 2022
Company HQ: USA
A next-generation Procurement platform with a mobile-first approach
Levelpath is a next-generation Procurement platform, with an intuitive, mobile-first approach. This elegantly maps the process - ensuring that all users can instinctively find where they need to go - whilst streamlining workflows and approvals, and enriching supplier data for enterprises of all sizes.
Founded: 2015
Company HQ: USA
Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose AI benefits all of humanity. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core. OpenAI is dedicated to putting that alignment of interests first - ahead of profit.
To achieve its mission, OpenAI's investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion is ongoing, executed through a wide range of initiatives, and championed and supported by leadership.
Founded: 2020
Company HQ: USA
Delivering effortless Procurement experiences
ORO is an intelligent workflow orchestration platform that offers effortless self-service experiences, to accelerate supplier onboarding, reduce maverick spend, and decrease risk through end-to-end process visibility.
Founded in 2020 by former SAP Ariba product leaders, ORO helps Fortune 500 and fast-growing global companies to scale Procurement operations, through intuitive self-service experiences that allow occasional users to easily navigate Procurement workflows, with no training required. It provides visibility across processes as they happen, so organisations can take action before it’s too late. And, it allows Procurement departments to adapt with ease, thanks to a no-code experience, designed from the ground up with the Procurement professional in mind.
ORO is on a mission to humanise the Procurement experience for every user, with solutions to streamline sourcing, risk management, contracting, purchase to pay and supplier management.
Founded: 1983
Company HQ: USA
Low code platform for AI-powered decision making
Pega provides a powerful low-code platform that builds agility into the world’s leading organisations, so they can effectively adapt to change.
Clients use Pega's AI-powered decisions and workflow automation to solve their most pressing business challenges – from personalising engagement, to automating services and streamlining operations. Since 1983, Pega has built its scalable and flexible architecture to help enterprises meet today’s customer demands, while continuously transforming for tomorrow.
Founded: 2015
Company HQ: USA
Build processes people actually follow
Tonkean is a first-of-its-kind process experience platform. With Tonkean, internal teams can build processes people actually follow. 67% of employees admit to routinely ignoring legal processes, and up to 80% of invoices are from “rogue spend.”
To fix compliance issues, avoid costly mistakes and improve efficiency, internal support teams (like Legal and Procurement) need higher adoption of their processes. The only way to get higher adoption is by optimising the process experience for the requestor.
Tonkean seamlessly wraps around users' existing policies and systems, allowing them to do more with what they already have. Tonkean enables users to build process experiences that are personalised for each requestor, and empowers them to intelligently automate the intake, triage, and coordination of every request, thereby maximising adoption, compliance and efficiency.
Founded: 2020
Company HQ: USA
The world's leading intake-to-procure solution
Zip provides one place for any employee to initiate a purchase or vendor request. Each request is correctly routed for approval across Procurement, Finance, IT, Data security, Legal and other teams.
Zip integrates into all major ERP and P2P solutions, to create a PR or draft PO. It works with Canva, Checkr, Hopin, Zapier and many other companies, both public and private.
Learn more about the 2023 ProcureTech100.
