Determine, Inc.

URL: https://www.determine.com/
Procuement Technology

Ultimately, we’ve gone through a huge business transformation these past two years as we united three companies under Determine, Inc. to serve the needs of our customers. Seeing the evolution from point solution to platforms, we realized the importance of allowing organizations the flexibility to safely connect several modular solutions in strategic sourcing, SRM, P2P and CLM functionality.

Especially for upper middle-market to smaller multi-nationals, say between $500M - $10B, who are under the same levels of compliance and regulatory demands as larger companies but may not have the required bandwidth or resources, we provide a user-friendly, out of the box suite of solutions to make end-to-end visibility much easier. There’s an auto trail tracking anything that happens at any point in time from source to pay.

We do see a challenge in helping companies continue to optimize analytics and leverage the data in strategic decision-making beyond savings and risk mitigation; the CPO has a real opportunity to partner closely with other parts of the business and deliver not just savings, but savings+. Key is to deploy tools with a great user interface and drive adoption – and empowerment - across all levels of the organization.

We genuinely try to develop our projects and solutions for our customers. That’s where Spend Matters comes in; you help us validate what we do, help us re-think at times. Foremost, we depend on you to fact check solutions and create accountability for service providers to ‘do what we’re saying’ in the interest of procurement practitioners in a more conversational way than other analyst organizations. Spend Matters also expands the industry by identifying capability needs. You create awareness, we create the tools.

IQNavigator

URL: http://iqnavigator.com
Services Procurement

Brian HoffMeyer, GVP of Marketing Strategies, IQNavigator
As GVP of Marketing Strategies, I am responsible for designing, pricing, launching and marketing all IQN’s products. I drive IQN’s roadmap and spend a lot of time listening to the broader services procurement market to ensure we hear and reflect what it is saying in our products and content marketing.

IQN empowers customers to quickly and easily turn complex services spend into a new source of value, competitive advantage and continuous bottom-line improvement. We are enthused by the rapid growth of the non-employee workforce. Contractors now make up 30-40% of the total workforce. We have clients across many industries and geographies, and none can get their product out the door without their non-employee workforce.

I believe not only the category manager but also the CEO needs to be aware of the risks and benefits that can be gained from the non-employee workforce.

Spend Matters drives thought leadership in this area; I like the greater viewpoint you take to inform companies on all the new sources of supply (e.g. workforce platforms). Spend Matters’ dedicated expertise evolves with the marketplace and you also help us get our message out; we want our clients to develop a plan to address this part of the workforce. I appreciate the live events, content creation and advisory services you provide; you help us think through our options and help the industry realize the importance of elevating the non-employee workforce to the right levels.

I always say, somewhat jokingly, that if I were a big investor, knowing what I know about contract labor, I’d address this challenge at shareholder meetings.

Wilbur Curtis

URL: http://www.wilburcurtis.com
Industrial Equipment Supplier

Ron Wilson, CPO, Wilbur Curtis
When Ron Wilson joined Wilbur Curtis, a manufacturer of coffee and tea brewing systems, he was used to buying aluminum and lead, but he had to brush up on steel products – which are critical to the manufacturing process and one of their top spend categories.

Especially given the constant volatility in prices and surcharges, delayed delivery, allocations or extended lead times by mills and not being a particularly large customer, he decided to focus on establishing a close partnership with a service center to nullify these challenges. Committing to this partnership over the last 10+ years has resulted in the service center successfully engaging in the product development process, suggesting alternate (lower cost) steel types (with less nickel) and even a shortened supply chain by buying painted steel – instead of having a third party processing function add on a powder coat. The service center also holds additional stock to accommodate demand spikes.

Wilbur Curtis consumes a number of MetalMiner services:

• The monthly MMI Report
• The Monthly Metal Buying Outlook/Forecast Report
• The Annual Metals Outlook
• Seminars/Conferences/Webinars

Given the continuous ups and downs of the market, MetalMiner educates and assists Ron to adjust his buying strategy. He may not hedge but MetalMiner insights help him in conversations and negotiations with his supplying mills and service centers. He’s currently participating in the new MetalMiner benchmarking program through which he can compare his prices to prices paid by similar companies, for similar quantities of the same product across the US by region or by industry. Ron feels this will be a powerful, concrete tool he can use specifically in negotiations. Ron: “MetalMiner has broadened my knowledge of the metals world. It keeps me informed on what is happening and what is upcoming in the industry - which sure beats finding generic info on the web” (as he did previously).