As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
During the pandemic, a lot of attention has gone to the CHRO and the CIO as companies moved to WFH, as they plan on safely opening physical sites and as companies accelerate digital transformations. The Chief Procurement Officer, in some ways, has had to perform even more spectacular cartwheels. Think of how many supply chains have broken down (think PPE, toilet paper, meatpacking plants, anything sourced from China etc). Or how many customers have entered new markets to survive or thrive during the pandemic and how many new suppliers they have had to explore. Think also about new demands as companies accelerate diversity and sustainability initiatives.
I had a chance to catch up with Stephany Lapierre, Founder and CEO and with Matt Palackdharry, VP of Strategy at TealBook. The Toronto based company is helping companies develop what they call "Universal Supplier Profiles". Traditionally procurement has mostly relied on portals to collect information directly from suppliers and that gets stale quickly. With TealBook, the data layer is constantly maintained through AI and machine learning (harvesting data from over 400 million websites), so customers don't have to spend so much time maintaining their data, rely mostly on supplier-provided data or search for new vendors via their own web searches. The supplier job is also easier as they can build on what TealBook has already harvested.
I especially like that their focus is not just on indirect spend. With so many companies re-shoring or entering new markets, there is growing interest in new Tier 1 and 2 suppliers.
In the presentation/demo below Matt provides a product perspective (especially what he calls Autonomous Data Foundation in their stack) with a number of very nice vertical (particularly biopharma) and global examples. Lots of discovery, diversity, sustainability support. As he says just about every Fortune 100 company is now a customer.
Later in the week, I will run an interview with Stephany about megatrends and heroics in the procurement function.
