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The Benefits of Best-of-Breed Solutions

How best-of-breed can elevate Procurement

Watch the Introduction

Enable A Best-Of-Breed Environment For Procurement Transformation

Disruptive events have put resilience at the top of the agenda for supply chain and procurement professionals. Consequently, more emphasis than ever is being placed on future digital procurement solutions and how they can be used to provide the levels of transparency, collaboration and agility required for the procurement function of tomorrow.

Options include further investment in legacy suites, investment into new best-of-breed technologies, or adopting a hybrid approach and investing in both types of solutions based on business needs. An increasing number of companies are pursuing this best-of-breed hybrid approach.

These organizations understand that:

  • Solely relying on traditional solutions is no longer effective as they are not sufficient to deal with the ever-increasing range of business cases
  • A data foundation must be in place to enable best-of-breed
  • A strategy is needed for the successful implementation and adoption of solutions

9%

of organizations are committed to a suite-only strategy

99%

of suppliers have more than two supplier-facing systems that their suppliers interact with

3000

percent rise in VC deals in procurement space across Europe from 2010-2020

415m

euros is a total number of VC investment into procurement technology

The Benefits of Best-of-Breed Technologies

How Data-Led Procurement Solutions Create Value

In the first webinar in this series, we are joined by Sammeli Sammalkorpi, CEO of Sievo and Costas Xyloyiannis, CEO of HICX, who discussed the rise of the best-of-breed landscape and the role data plays within.

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How Data Drives Supplier Experience, Digitization and Transformation

In Part 2 we have welcomed Adriano Garibotto, Chief S&M Officer of Creactives and Costas Xyloyiannis, CEO of HICX to explore how best-of-breed solutions provide a faster time to value.

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How Best-of-Breed Technology Enables Strategic Transformation of Procurement

In the final part of the series, we look at supplier centricity and the ROI of SXM. For this discussion, we are joined by Mary Beth Lang, Chief Supply Chain and Procurement Officer at Kaiser Permanente; and Robert Bonnar, Global Procurement Director, at SHV Energy.

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Rethinking the Safe Option: Why a Best-of-Breed Hybrid Environment Is Becoming More Attractive

As the saying goes, “No-one ever got fired for buying IBM.” It reflects the perceived safety of choosing traditional, familiar-branded, legacy software over alternative innovative technologies from other vendors. However, given the speed of technological development in Procurement, is a single-vendor suite really the ‘safe’ option?

The need to better facilitate information sharing, communications or specialized workflows in niche areas are frequently outside the scope of single-vendor suite solutions.

Most suites, despite claiming to offer a ‘one-stop shop’ for multiple requirements, are not really integrated at all. They tend to be based on different solutions and architectures acquired over time. It is also often presumed that a suite will be ‘seamless’ across all modules. However, most aren’t. Experience has shown that modules do not always work well together within the suite itself, let alone in combination with external solutions.

It is for these reasons that the best-of-breed hybrid environment is becoming more attractive.

Listen to an Interview on Cloud-Based Procurement Software

Guest: James Meads

Learn about:

  • Cloud-based Procurement software
  • The future of best-of-breed solutions
  • Lessons learned from supply chain crises

[Whitepaper] How To Adopt Best-of-Breed as Part of a Procurement Digital Transformation Strategy

This whitepaper explores the necessary components of best-of-breed planning, including:

  • How to ensure the right data foundations are in place to support a best-of-breed environment
  • How to architect for flexibility, extensibility and user experience
  • How to build a business use case driven approach
How to Adopt Best-Of-Breed as Part of a Procurement Digital Transformation Strategy

How to Enable Best-of-Breed ProcureTech with Dr. Elouise Epstein – Kearney

The panel discusses how to enable best-of-breed ProcureTech and the reasons why best-of-breed solutions within the ProcureTech landscape are growing so rapidly, and the importance of adopting a strategy-based approach for implementation to ensure success.

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Tackling Increasingly Complex Procurement Requirements

As an organization’s Procurement function matures, it also gets more complex. Requirements become more specific. Best-of-breed software is able to tackle specific challenges of an organization as they are built with these use cases in mind.

As Dr. Elouise Epstein, Partner at Kearney, highlights, it means that increasingly the ProcureTech landscape will be characterized by numerous plug-ins. The result: “An ecosystem of connected microservices offering value-creating point solutions.”

This underpins the best-of-breed hybrid technology landscape, comprising centralized platform components, supported by a range of specialist solutions from vendors with deep expertise and knowledge in specific fields. New services can be added all the time as requirements quickly evolve. This is already happening in areas such as cybersecurity, sustainability, or diversity and inclusion, as well as in the traditional activities of discovery, sourcing, pricing, contracting and invoicing.

Enabling a Best-of-Breed Environment

A critical foundation for all new services is robust, good-quality data, accessible across different services and platforms. Having the right centralized platform configuration to provide the basis for the enablement of a best-of-breed landscape is therefore key.

By using HICX as part of the centralized platform, organizations such as Mondelez International, BAE Systems, EDF Energy, and others, have been able to support the best-of-breed hybrid architecture. They have been able to consolidate their data, streamline their workflows and improve supplier experience.

As Stephane Sacherer, Associate Director Global Procure to Pay at Mondelēz International, explains, “In order to build a best-in-class experience, you have to have the right foundations that enable the deployment of best-of-breed solutions. With HICX, we now have that and we are looking forward to further differentiating ourselves across the board in areas such as SRM, invoicing, PO and quality management, among others.”

The Era of Best of Breed Solutions: Experts Weigh In

With the right data foundations, best-of-breed solutions are providing more options and therefore exciting new opportunities for Procurement to improve transparency, drive collaboration and become more agile.

It is heralding a new era for Procurement, putting it at the forefront of some of the biggest challenges facing organizations and calling for more cross-functional collaboration than ever before.

The Era of Best of Breed Solutions Experts Weigh In

What we have seen, at least with our customers, is the ones which are in industries which, I would say, have very mature procurement functions, is they have started to trend more and more to best-of-breed. Because, if you think about it, as a Procurement function matures, you have more acute, specialized needs.

Costas Xyloyiannis, CEO of HICX

“We’ve seen more niche solutions that have been addressing very specific needs, very acute pains on the market that were not properly filled or fulfilled by the suite vendors.”

Pierre Laprée, CEO of Per Angusta

“With the best-of-breed you actually need a strategy. I think with the suite it was easier to put your hands up and say now the suite provider takes care of everything and I just paid the bill, and everything goes perfectly. The best-of-breed strategy requires more attention and thinking from the procurement how to drive, I think it leads to much better solution as well, but it does require more responsibility by the practitioners.”

Sammeli Sammalkorpi, CEO of Sievo

“Traditional technology is wholly inadequate to support the digital evolution. There is a mountain, an overwhelming amount of evidence, to say that the way we’ve done it in the past doesn’t work. It’s abundantly clear that we have to do something different. The point is, we need a new architecture.”

Dr Elouise Epstein, Partner at Kearney

“First advice, don’t fear. The technology is here to support. So, there is no interest from the technology to make things complex. To make things simple is indeed a core focus for all providers. You have to be focused and the focus requires a best-of-breed approach.”

Adriano Garibotto, Chief Sales and Marketing

“What we have seen, at least with our customers, is the ones which are in industries which, I would say, have very mature procurement functions, is they have started to trend more and more to best-of-breed. Because, if you think about it, as a Procurement function matures, you have more acute, specialized needs.”

Costas Xyloyiannis, CEO of HICX

Contact Sales To Discuss How Best-of-Breed Can Work for Your Organization