Gartner has recently released its 2017 Magic Quadrant for Strategic Sourcing Application Suites. Gartner believes that innovation in procurement and sourcing technology continues and organizations are beginning to leverage their strategic sourcing suites for much more than just running events and documenting contractual agreements.

The report evaluates 14 vendors on two parameters: Ability to Execute – product or service, overall viability, sales execution/pricing, market responsiveness/record, market execution, customer experience and operations; ; and Completeness of Vision – market understanding, market strategy, sales strategy, offering (product) strategy, business model, vertical/industry strategy, innovation and geographic strategy.

Zycus, once again a leader in the Gartner’s 2017 MQ for Strategic Sourcing Application Suites, believes that its position as a leader is attributed to its high level of overall customer satisfaction, high scores across all four core modules: Spend Analytics, eSourcing, CLM and SBM, highly thought of product offerings compared with most other vendors and strong market understanding.

Some of the key findings from the report are*:

• According to the reference clients, the top three reasons for investing in a strategic sourcing suite are “to transform strategic sourcing within our organization” (59.2%), “to increase productivity by automating strategic sourcing within our organization” (58.7%) and “to deliver increased savings” (53.1%)
• There is a strong trend towards suites, and end users are now looking for better intrasuite integration. Meeting this requirement is something that many vendors have focused on during the past few years
• Strategic sourcing suites are most often deployed as stand-alone suites that are not integrated with any other solutions (54.7%). The most common system to integrate with is one or more ERP system (36.3%), followed by external data sources such as D&B (17.1%)

Zycus believes that this journey as a leader in 3 consecutive reports (2013-2015-2017) has been made possible by its determination to continually innovate new functionality and being highly responsive to customer requirements.

Click here to read Gartner’s analysis of the procurement technology landscape in detail.

* Source: Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Strategic Sourcing Application Suites, Magnus Bergfors, et al, February 2017

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