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Salman Siddiqui, COO, Kyle Muskoff, VP of Product & Professional Services, Jack Mulloy, CEO and Nicholas Cron, CTOWith over two decades of experience in the enterprise procurement space, Jack Mulloy observed this drawback firsthand, after working with numerous e-procurement applications. Due to poor user interfaces and unsatisfactory customer experience, businesses struggled to get their employees to use these procurement solutions. To solve the problem, Mulloy co-founded BuyerQuest with the idea to provide a B2C user experience to drive user adoption to help save time and drive down costs. “Typically, only one percent of professionals are procurement experts while the other 99 percent just want to find the right Product or Service to do their job. With BuyerQuest, we have retained the important procurement processes, while also providing an interface that is user-friendly to those employees,” says Mulloy, CEO of BuyerQuest.
Today, over one million users from different sectors leverage the self-service BuyerQuest platform to efficiently manage their entire procurement process and transform their procurement experience. Kyle Muskoff, VP of Product and Professional Services at BuyerQuest elaborates, "Our platform is a B2C storefront that creates a unified buying experience for employees while ensuring that all corporate procurement controls are in place."
Unified E-Commerce Storefront
BuyerQuest offers two main solutions— Marketplace and Procure-to-Pay. The BuyerQuest Marketplace integrates directly with a business’s current ERP or MRP systems, where multiple suppliers can upload the details of all their products and services into a single storefront for an intuitive B2C-like shopping experience. The Procure-to-Pay solution extends upon that Marketplace to allow for requisition approval, purchase order creation, receiving, invoice creation, invoice reconciliation, and settlement.
“We offer a procure-to-pay solution with a focus on e-procurement to help organizations control their business spend,” states Mulloy. “We maintain the easy-to-use, intuitive interface throughout the entire procure-to-pay experience, which is why our clients rate us the best in the procurement market.”
Both solutions function as a single channel e-commerce storefront where suppliers can host all of their contracted goods and services for their buyers. Suppliers can upload and modify catalogs automatically, as the platform provides real-time content validation and robust catalog approval rules for a seamless, collaborative process. All of the content from the suppliers resides in one place, making it easy to search for the required commodities and services the users need. The BuyerQuest Platform also enables suppliers to respond to RFQs directly from the users, with an easy to use interface for creating and maintaining quotes. Within the Procure-to-Pay solution, suppliers can also manage their purchase orders electronically and create invoices either through an e-invoicing integration or directly on the portal.
Enhancing Experience with Cognitive Computing and Embedded Analytics
One of the reasons why our clients come back to us is because they see us not only as a solutions provider but also as a trusted advisor
To provide a refined user experience, BuyerQuest brings cognitive computing to enterprise procurement to accelerate user adoption and reduce the time spent on requisitioning. To foster 'cognitive buying,' the BuyerQuest platform has behavioral analytics that tracks the buyers’ actions and uses that to provide a more efficient shopping experience. To help users find the products and services they seek, the company leverages machine learning to increase 'Speed to Selection' – a focus for BuyerQuest of getting the users through the requisition experience as efficiently as possible. Many of these types of enhancements come from client recommendations, due to the deep relationships that BuyerQuest has formed with their current client base. “One of the reasons why our clients stay with us is because they see us not only as a solutions provider but also as a trusted advisor,” says Nicholas Cron, CTO of BuyerQuest.
BuyerQuest’s platform also has an embedded analytics module that functions as a complete reporting engine. It has the capability to track a host of procurement metrics in great detail, enabling strategic category and spend management analysis. “We provide visibility and insights to clients while enabling drill-down reporting all the way to the transaction level,” remarks Salman Siddiqui, COO of BuyerQuest. Clients can also develop a deeper understanding of buyers’ needs through robust search analytics. They gain insights into key metrics with easy-to-use visualization tools on un-met demands and intelligently broaden their category coverage for effective spend analysis and category management. According to Siddiqui, a key differentiator of BuyerQuest is their ability to capture users’ buying information and empower the customers to understand their organizations spend.
Despite all the features that are available, the BuyerQuest solution actually requires minimal change management for both the users and administrators. BuyerQuest is completely business-enabled, a business executive or other non-technical administrators can self-manage the solution without involving the IT department. If needed though, the company also has a world-class support team in place that provides technical, user, and supplier related support to assist clients from a pre-sales and post-sales perspective.
"With BuyerQuest, we have retained the important procurement processes and layered an interface on top of it that is user-friendly to the employees"
Scripting Success Stories
BuyerQuest has an extensive portfolio of clients that consist of Fortune 500 enterprises as well as mid-market companies with representation from the airline, construction, education, grocery, healthcare, logistics, media and entertainment, and oil and gas industries. Take for example the construction industry where companies have multiple teams working different shifts on the same project. Construction Project Managers struggle with duplicate and incomplete orders, which lead to unnecessary returns, change orders, and high shipping costs. BuyerQuest solves this issue by providing a ‘collaborative’ shopping experience, where users can share a single cart ensuring that they are ordering the right products at the right time.
Another success story is that of a Quick Service Restaurant with over 2,000 franchisees that was able to go live and deploy the BuyerQuest solution across all of their stores within four months. BuyerQuest provided a rapid restaurant adoption strategy, enabling the franchisees to buy and pay for the goods and services required to operate the restaurant. The client conducted a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey after the launch and received a feedback rating of 9 out of 10 across the hundreds of individuals they surveyed. Not only were the users happy, but management also witnessed on-contract, PO-backed spend increase by 62 percent and have been able to achieve significant cost savings in the process.
With such an impressive track record, BuyerQuest has established its presence in the North American market and is expanding its geographical footprint into APAC. BuyerQuest’s near-term roadmap includes extending their product line by introducing a contracts module as well as continuing to leverage its clients' and partners' data to deliver higher value in the procurement space. Over the next year, the company is also investing heavily in AI and machine learning technologies with the end goal to continue to make the shopping experience more efficient and comfortable for users.
March 18, 2019
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