Accounts payable invoice automation (APIA) tools automate the capture, validation and processing of invoices. These solutions attempt to automatically match invoices to purchase orders (POs) and contracts, or automatically code those invoices that would not have a PO. Payment management, ranging from OK to pay to complete invoice payment, is also included. The expanded scope of APIA includes advanced capabilities, such as automated multiway matching, fraud detection and cash management.
The supply chain A&DI technology market spans capabilities that provide different types of analytics, focusing on predictive and prescriptive ones. Many of these offerings have been enhanced with AI and DSML capabilities to support supply chain decision making. These capabilities could either be part of a broader supply chain application/suite or a separate encompassing A&DI platform. Such a platform consists of existing and emerging technologies, including: Graph technology, Advanced analytics, AI, DSML, Model development & Digital supply chain twin (DSCT).
Gartner defines contract life cycle management (CLM) market as a solution that proactively manages contracts from initiation through negotiation, execution, compliance and renewal. In this context, a contract is any agreement or contractual document containing rights and obligations that affect an organization now or in the future (e.g., a nondisclosure agreement). CLM solutions allow organizations to create, negotiate and store contracts in a centralized repository. Using these solutions helps mitigate organizational risk by enabling regulatory and policy compliance, providing governance over what is signed and with whom, and role-based access to terms and obligations with third parties. CLM solutions drive visibility, consistency and efficiency in the contracting process across an enterprise. Use cases are primarily aligned to parts of the process, such as presignature and postsignature. Different departments often prioritize a certain use case based on their involvement in the contracting process.
Corporate Travel Management Software empowers organizations to streamline the process of arranging travels and managing all travel-related expenses while complying with corporate travel policies. The software allows employees to book, manage and track trips without the intervention of any specialist agents. These trips can be approved and reimbursed by the administrators through an automated approval workflow. Organizations use software to create travel data reports as well as to gain insights to control and optimize their travel spend. The functionality of the software is also extended to tracking and consolidating historical travel invoices.
E-sourcing applications enable organizations to organize, solicit and evaluate requests for information (RFIs) and requests for proposals (RFPs) from suppliers. These applications enable competitive bidding where the outcome is typically a long-term agreement. Most e-sourcing applications also support reverse auction capabilities. Some applications enable large-scale complex bid events with thousands of line items and awards spanning multiple suppliers.
Organizations use expense management software to simplify their expense reimbursement and reconciliation process. The software provides facilities for expense report creation, submission, approval, reimbursement, and accounting. The software replaces the manual paperwork with an automated workflow to upload, track and submit expense receipts conveniently. These reimbursement receipts are accessible to the administrators through a streamlined process to approve the claims while checking for any corporate policy violations. In addition, the software assists organizations in keeping track of their employee’s corporate expenses.
Gartner defines IT vendor risk management (IT VRM) as the discipline of addressing the residual risk that businesses and governments face when working with external service providers, IT vendors and related third parties. The scope typically addresses risks related to data protection, business continuity, security and other risk domains as relevant to laws, regulation and industry practices.
Gartner defines the source-to-pay (S2P) suite market as an integrated set of solutions to source, contract, request, procure, receive and pay for goods and services across an enterprise. These solutions typically are sold as cloud-based software as a service. Source-to-pay suites allow organizations to manage all of their sourcing and procurement activities within a single integrated solution. These solutions are modular in nature allowing customers to activate the functionality that is relevant for their needs. The integrated nature of these solutions allows for data to easily flow across the source-to-pay process providing needed visibility to upstream and downstream documents. An example of this would be the ability to view a purchase order and see the contract that the purchase is related to, the e-sourcing event that led to the contract and downstream documents such as receipts, invoices and payments.
Strategic sourcing application suites are a set of related, integrated solutions that support upstream procurement activities; in other words, the strategic work the procurement team does for planning, assessment and performance management. Strategic sourcing application suites are used primarily by companies with $800 million or more in annual revenue that, typically, have the necessary critical mass of spend. The strategic sourcing application suite delivers four primary capabilities. Most vendors offer these capabilities as separately licensable modules: Spend analysis is a software- and service-based solution for cleansing, enhancing, classifying and analyzing spend data. It features rule-based data cleansing, automated category-level classification, analytics and decision support. Automated spend analysis is used in procurement and sourcing to quantify spend by supplier, category and part, and to identify opportunities for cost reduction and supply base resizing.
A cost-to-serve analysis creates a solid understanding on where and how costs are incurred through an organization. It is about modeling costs that are different for each customer and product, and ensuring they are allocated fairly. The CTS analysis solution market’s most common use cases are: - More informed product portfolio management - Costing decisions and supply network design - Gain sharing between suppliers and customers - Identification and allocation of costs to suppliers and customers - Improved process and resource efficiency
Gartner defines network design as the optimization of the location and function of supply, manufacturing and distribution networks in support of an overarching company strategy and customer requirements. Supply chain network design tools support the creation of network models with the application of analytics to determine the optimal supply chain design in a structured, scalable and repeatable way. Supply chain network design tools support the determination of recommendations about the structure of the supply chain network. This includes decisions about facility locations and size, transport lanes, and modes in the end-to-end supply chain. The scale of the changes being evaluated vary from small modifications, such as changing a mode of transport or swapping transportation lanes, to large-scale changes that involve opening/closing/repurposing several facilities in the network and the associated knock on impacts. The use of supply chain network design tools to support the decision-making process enables companies to review more potential configurations for the network than a manual process allows, supporting a complete, data-driven decision making process. These decisions are usually made in strategic and tactical time frames.
Gartner defines supply chain planning (SCP) solutions as platforms that provide technological support to enable a company to manage, link, align, collaborate and share its planning data across an extended supply chain. An SCP solution supports planning, ranging from demand planning through detailed supply-side response planning and from strategic planning through execution-level planning. It is the planning decision repository for a defined end-to-end supply chain. It is also the environment in which end-to-end-integrated supply chain decisions are managed. It establishes a single version of the truth for planning data and decisions, regardless of the underlying execution technology environment. Organizations use SCP solutions to improve their supply chain planning decisions and reach higher levels of maturity.