Xeeva
Full Procurement Data Analysis

Procurement plays a vital role in the decision-making process of various departments in a company. The operation helps streamline the organization’s business by reducing raw materials costs and identifying better supply sources, reducing the ‘bottom line’ cost. Where organizations heavily prioritize controlling the direct procurement costs like acquiring raw materials and goods for production, they often neglect small costs generated during indirect procurement like process maintenance and buying day-to-day supplies and services as they don’t significantly impact the company’s bottom line. Hence, the associated data collection and analysis during final spend analysis are flawed and inconsistent, resulting in unforeseen costs and missed opportunities. Enter Xeeva—a procurement and spend analysis solution provider that takes indirect procurement data to reduce a client’s business operation’s bottom line efficiently.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Aparna Gude, VP of Product Management, Xeeva, explains how the company utilizes cutting-edge technology for efficient procurement and sourcing data analysis to reduce a customer’s overall operating costs.

Can you give our readers a background on Xeeva and how did it start?

Xeeva originally started as a procurement solution provider. Pay-to-Procure (P2P) was the core solution that we offered to our customers. Later, we added a sourcing solution to our products and services. More recently, we launched a spend analytics solution. We now offer our customers a full end-to-end suite of solutions ranging from data collection and processing, to classification, to enrichment, to spend analytics, to sourcing, and to a procurement solution. We also have relationships with valued suppliers that our customers can engage What would you say are the greatest pain points your clients face in the procurement supply chain space? How does Xeeva help them tackle the issues?

Conventionally, an organization pays very little attention to indirect procurement practices (maintenance, indirect, small goods, and services). They are fragmented among multiple business units and are considered as low priority operations. Lack of priority towards this spend leads to poor data collection and spend tracking within the organization. As a result, companies often have difficulties in making strategic decisions on how to save procurement costs.

Another one of the biggest challenges in procurement supply chains is the quality of indirect spend data. Fragmented data, multiple ERPs, high volume and diversity of buyers, different users with different ways to classify data, and many other factors contribute to inconsistent and poor quality spend data.

Xeeva leverages new technologies like AI and ML to counter such data issues. We developed vast databases of what we call the supplier universe and item universe, which includes independently sourced data as well as data of goods and services from our network of customers. We have also developed our proprietary master taxonomy that we use to map to any industry specific taxonomy or to a customer specific taxonomy. We revolutionized our own thinking and approach to indirect spend. We focus on the solution (and not a product).

We focus on what solutions address our customer’s business issues related to indirect spend, whether that problem is related to cost, cash flow, risk, or suppliers. We focus on the journey from data to payments.

Our spend analytics solution has data quality insights. The moment we complete the data processing, we surface it on our homepage, and our customers can see what their data looked like, how Xeeva processed it, and what it looks like after Xeeva processed it. We are very transparent about our customer’s data and how we are continuously and iteratively improving it. This is a huge focus for us.

Our cost savings insights and curated dashboards with deep analytics focus on surfacing savings potential. They emphasize managing the cost savings and working capital. We have expertise in category management and sourcing management. Together, all these things allow us to focus on a solution to address any indirect spend problems.

Another great market pain-point is time-to-value where customers need a solution to deliver results in the quickest time possible. To address the issue, we lowered our cost of investment for the clients. All our applications are cloud-based, multi-talented solutions. We provide an end-to-end digital experience from spend analytics to sourcing to procurement. We use AI/ML for fast processing of data. Our goal is to provide better quality of service and scalability based on the customer needs to provide real time-to-value by fast launch.

At the end of the day, we focus on user experience. Our objective is to make onboarding new customers fast and easy.

It would be great if you can give our readers a customer success story where a client came to you with an issue, and you helped them through it.

Once, a customer came to us looking for a procurement-specific solution. Their business challenge was to increase compliance in procurement, and they started with our P2P application to establish compliance to practice. They built a catalog of their products with negotiated pricing and so forth. It worked well but only to a certain point. Alhough they had all the required technical tools and processes in place and available to them, and even with internal organizational support and best practices, they still struggled. Their most significant hurdle was they had a substantial user base and thus adhering to best practices was still a challenge. They didn’t have visibility to all the spend that was occurring. We realized that the business problem had moved from compliance and best practices to consistency and visibility. To solve this new issue, we implemented both our spend analytics and sourcing solution to their business operations.

Now, they can envision the continuous lifecycle of their data from data collection, to classification, to visualization, to spend analysis, and to strategic sourcing. They expanded their use of Xeeva’s solutions from P2P to Spend Analytics and more. They also utilize our sourcing solution to drive improvements in costs and in negotiating rates with their suppliers.

How would you say the immediate roadmap looks for the company?

We want to support all organizations regardless of their size and spend amount with a breakneck implementation schedule. We plan to leverage and automate cutting-edge technologies like AI, ML, and OCR tools as much as possible. So, as I see, Xeeva’s biggest focus will be on helping organizations improve the quality of their data, and everything (analytics, sourcing, creating catalogs) will flow from there.

The most significant trends that I see Xeeva taking part in are:

a. Greater focus on seamless digital integration between deep analytic insights and spend savings. Seamlessly being able to go from spend data analysis to realizing cost savings in a short time.

b. Increasing partnerships between software solution providers and valued suppliers. The end goal is to ensure greater savings, reduced costs, higher quality products and services, and a trusted relationship between the customer, solution provider, and supplier.

In a nutshell, intelligent automated AI/ML tools to help classify data, advanced analytics, strategic sourcing, integration between all of the solutions, and partnerships between customers, suppliers, and solution providers are some of the things that Xeeva will focus on in the upcoming months.