In this Spend Matters PRO Vendor Analysis, we give an overview of Scoutbee, a SIM (supplier information management) and SDM (supplier discovery management) solution built to help organizations develop the best decision-making processes for supplier lifecycle management.
Suppliers are the cornerstone of procurement activities, and companies must understand suppliers in order to tap into this external value reservoir effectively and efficiently. However, many organizations do not have just one source of truth for supplier information, forcing them to spend a great deal of time and effort in collecting data — which rapidly becomes obsolete anyway — while the requirements and needs for information continuously increase.
A classic approach to tackling some of these challenges has been to offload the work onto suppliers by providing them with self-service portals. Even though the burden of data entries and maintenance has been displaced, manual tasks have not disappeared and still require human actions that are time-consuming and error-prone. And, to make things worse, many organizations took the same road, meaning suppliers must maintain the same information in multiple portals for all of their customers.
Scoutbee thinks there is a better way. That is why it is building and operating a supply-base knowledge platform built around three pillars: data, supplier profiles and search. In doing so, it offers customers the possibility to have better information on the suppliers they work with and to discover new ones without the hassle of manual entries. Scoutbee’s proprietary technology integrates, matches, classifies, consolidates and transforms supplier-related information from internal and external sources to make it usable in Scoutbee’s own application as well as in others that consume it.
-
Here’s why Scoutbee matters:
- To the market — SIM is at the core of most procurement processes, making it a crowded segment. Scoutbee has a differentiated approach relying on AI instead of data entries to provide insights on suppliers that it can orchestrate and broadcast to other systems.
- To customers — Scoutbee’s customers can understand who their suppliers are and discover new ones so they can work with the most relevant ones without spending excessive effort on collecting and aggregating information.
- To potential buyers — Scoutbee offers an efficient and effective way to manage supplier-related information with its AI-based approach to SIM and discovery.
This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Analysis explains what makes Scoutbee different from other SxM vendors, gives an overview of the vendor’s capabilities and its competitors, provides tech selection tips and closes with key analyst takeaways.
