SciQuest [NASDAQ:SQI]: Navigatorsof the Procurement Value Equation

Stephen J. Wiehe, President & CEO

Sitting around a Subway sandwich shop’s table, four students scribbled down “start-up” business ideas on a napkin for an entrepreneurial class project. The napkin wasn’t trashed; instead, the idea written on it whetted those students appetite to embark on their maiden entrepreneurial voyage—the foundation for the establishment of SciQuest (NASDAQ: SQI). Little did they know that this company would revolutionize the way organizations buy materials and cause a paradigm shift one day in the procurement space. Today, the company is the leading public provider of spend management solutions that delivers value beyond savings to enterprises across myriad of industries.

It was in 2001 that Stephen J. Wiehe, President, and CEO, SciQuest took over the reins of the firm and transformed it from an e-market exchange to the leading provider of on-demand eProcurement solutions for academic, healthcare, and research-centric organizations. Today, headquartered in Morrisville, NC, SciQuest’s full suite delivers increased visibility across entire procurement cycle. “By allowing total visibility and control of a transaction from start to finish, we know our customers consider their use of our products essential to their success,” says Wiehe.

Turning the Wheels of Procurement Cycle

Procurement is undergoing a significant transformation and moving from the back office into the limelight as a significant influencer of strategic business decisions. The focus of Procurement was controlling spending and enabling optimization but today, procurement must be equipped with the ability to manage the entire process, up-front in ways that allow proactive monitoring and strategic sourcing, enabling the procurement practice to be true partners with the business.

Wiehe, the veteran, being the far sighted man, understood that the procurement industry would need to leverage cloud and mobile technologies and leave the legacy cumbersome paper work far behind. He leveraged these trends into SciQuest’s offerings resulting in the firm’s cloud-driven, mobile-enabled, and source-to-settle platform that addresses all facets of procurement—from the automation of core processes to enabling sophisticated, strategic, and multifaceted sourcing solutions. Whether handling simple procurement needs or the most advanced supplier and supply chain requirements, SciQuest is specialized to deal with the requirements tactfully. The company tailors it solutions to the needs of various vertical markets by providing industry-specific functionality, content and supplier connections.

The company’s comprehensive procurement suite is modeled like an e-commerce platform, offering several options for Procurement, Supplier Management, Spend Analytics, Supplier Network, Sourcing, Inventory Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, and Accounts Payable.

SciQuest has been instrumental in bringing innovative and first-to-market solutions that provide our customers with the tools needed to transform business processes

Increased Visibility across Procurement Cycle

Empowering organizations to transform data into “powerhouse of information and insight” is SciQuest’s spend analytics software—Spend Radar. The prominence of this solution is backed by the fact that it leverages visual analytics, which has proven its mettle in making better sourcing and supplier decisions–at a time when many organizations manually look through data for patterns, gaps, and inconsistencies. The customers can utilize their real-time data and analytics to work at every stage of source-to settle process in order to gain visibility and efficiency through Spend Radar. The software provides analysis across all spend data sources as it is designed with a customer-driven data model that can seamlessly process any kind of data. The customers can easily access the high quality, high-volume data in a short period. “Our goal is to create the best source-to-settle spend management platform so our customers can be successful,” says Wiehe.

SciQuest also offers an eProcurement software, Spend Director to help organizations drive contract compliance, reduce spend, and increase efficiency. Organizations are always muddled with various tasks such as promoting preferred suppliers, ensuring that the buyers adhere to contract, and finding new opportunities to save money. Spend Director helps enterprises fix this problem by integrating and automating the processes, suppliers, compliance, and workflows. SciQuest’s eProcurement hub includes intuitive shopping environment, more than 2000 active supplier integrations, built-in supplier enablement, catalog management and contract compliance tracking.

Leveraging SciQuest’s eProcurement software the University of Montana could get rid of the manual procurement and account payable processes. Limited visibility and lack of centralized management of purchasing process posed various challenges for the university with its old system. The university partnered with SciQuest to automate all of their manual, paper-based processes to make procurement a value-added function across the entire organization. The customer used SciQuest’s eProcurement, eCataloging, and eInvoicing solutions to gain greater control and visibility to procurement. The university continues to bring greater value through its branded procurement site—GrzMart—powered by SciQuest for the fourth year in a row. “Being able to come to work each day with the challenge of making things better and improving it for our end users, who use GrizMart, is what motivates me, says Ian Robbins, Director of Procurement Services, University of Montana.

Cross Functional Vendor Management Efficiencies

Every organization requires a strong team of suppliers to fulfill their unique business requirements.However, enterprises might not clearly know which suppliers are capable of fulfilling their needs if they rely on manual process for supplier on boarding and management.

SciQuest’s vendor management software—Total Supplier Manager—simplifies this complicated task by automating the supplier management process, which can manage supplier spending effectively and efficiently. It also streamlines expensive processes to help organizations save their time and money. Total Supplier Manager discovers and gathers information about the vendors through registration, qualification and selection, to risk and performance management.

SciQuest’s vendor management capabilities are not just to manage various suppliers, they also support organizations to search and vet new suppliers though Supplier Network. It is a hub for organizations to access the ever-growing network of suppliers in single, centralized, global location. The Supplier Network brings customers and suppliers onto a single platform and helps them work together. The suppliers get benefited by the Supplier Network with the exposure to millions of procurement and sourcing professionals. They can easily create invoices, gain real-time visibility into POs, invoices, and payments.

"By allowing total visibility and control of a transaction from start to finish, we know our customers consider their use of our products essential to their success"

The company also helps organizations to find, evaluate and engage suppliers through its strategic sourcing software, Sourcing Director. Customers can easily create events, manage bids, and award contracts through this robust sourcing solution. Sourcing Director halves the routine bidding time, discovers the right suppliers to support business objectives, and ultimately guides organizations on a path toward efficiency and savings.

In addition to vendor management solutions, SciQuest delivers contract lifecycle management solution, which provides a fully searchable archive of executed contracts as well as automated workflows. The company also offers accounts payable, inventory management, and savings management solution in its full suite.

‘Focus On the Journey, Not the Destination’

Unlike many companies that focus on the goal, SciQuest’s leaders believe in focusing on every step of the journey. Each day, the company strives to develop technology, make customers happy, and build an employee-friendly culture. SciQuest has an “open kitchen” environment to maintain transparency and retain good relationships with employees, customers, and investors. This principle was imbibed into company’s culture observing the open kitchens in many restaurants. The leaders at SciQuest are proud of what goes on behind the scenes and allows customers to view what happens “in the kitchen”.

The company regularly collaborates with customers to improve their product development process. SciQuest brings the customers to their world so that it can serve them better. “SciQuest has been instrumental in bringing innovative and first-to-market solutions that provide our customers with the tools needed to transform business processes,” says Wiehe. The company aims to deliver exceptional value in user experience, productivity, and operational efficiency through the continued release of key innovative technology and a fanatical drive toward making the customers successful.

- Supriya Kumaraswamy
June 15, 2016