Procurement Summit Live Interviews – Part 1: Procurement Tech Companies

In the world of cross-border supply chains and procurement processes, innovation is revolutionizing the way businesses operate. In this exclusive interview series recorded live at the Procurement Summit, we dive into the minds of some visionary procuretech startup founders who are at the forefront of driving change in the industry. First up is Romain Fayolle, Founder and CEO of Holocene Holocene is a startup that optimises and automates logistics processes for cross-border supply chain. As I touch on in the interview, this has traditionally been a very manual process. Automation AND visibility in this space is much-needed, and it's great to come across innovation for this topic. Next up is Christoph Moll of beNeering. We often get frustrated as procurement professionals about incumbent ERP systems, and how inflexible or complicated they are to use because of their front end interface and vast array of features. The reality is though, companies aren't going to abandon them overnight. This conversation looks at making life easy with an intuitive front-end that seamlessly works in tandem with a SAP environment. I then spoke to one of the industry stalwarts and one of the major sponsors of Procurement Summit, Jan-Hendrik Sohn, country manager DACH for Ivalua. Even though I'm a huge fan of best-of-breed tech, this was actually a conversation I really enjoyed. It was really cool to get an understanding of how one of the established suites is positioning itself in such a rapidly changing market, and where they see their advantage and USP over some of their fierce competitors. Keeping on the topic of Source-to-Pay, next up is Eberhard Aust, CEO of ebidtopay. They're a niche provider of S2P solutions for mid-market manufacturing businesses and their software does a LOT for its price point. They've been around a while but are really focusing on offering a suite-like set of features at a price point that doesn't require an enterprise software budget. Full disclosure, ebidtopay is one of our software partners at ProcurementSoftware.site, and you can reach out to me if you'd like to learn more about them. Christoph Kunel, COO of e-procurement platform Crowdfox is next up. Catalogue procurement is not new technology. However, using generative AI - the same technology that powers ChatGPT - to assist and enhance the requisitioner's front end experience, is a simple but huge value add enhancement. He explains how "ProcureGPT" works in their platform.