Determine (NASDAQ: DTRM): Turn Client Challenges into Opportunities

Patrick Stakenas, President, CEO & Director

Technology is catalyzing change. In recent years, procurement has made big strides in moving from a purely cost-oriented, transactional function to a strategic value-adding activity. Agility, improved technology, and greater collaboration with stakeholders are trends that procurement has adopted to drive further enterprise value as businesses seek better control of enterprise spend and improved visibility into contractual agreements. Addressing the procurement concerns, Determine’s Enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management (ECLM) strategy provides governance and analytics over master contract data and the lifecycle of every contract. “Companies are putting enterprise contract lifecycle management solutions at the top of their agendas to significantly drive cost savings and compliance, increase revenue generation, and manage risk,” says Patrick Stakenas, President, CEO and Director of Determine.

Determine’s CLM solution makes the entire contract lifecycle more efficient, from contract request, authoring, negotiation, and approval, through contract execution, amendment, and renewal. It provides an enterprise view of contracts and comprehensive reporting capabilities which allow businesses to automate their ongoing supervision of contractual relationships by consolidating and maintaining accurate contract data, while also minimizing risk and improving compliance. Apart from ECLM, the company’s Source-to-Pay suite comprises of multiple business applications for Supplier Management, Financial Management, Invoice Management, and Sourcing. “Each of our solutions operates fully on its own. They become more powerful when integrated,” says Stakenas.

The company’s greatest differentiating factor is the Determine Engine, a smart and powerful tool in the cloud platform to manage the complexity of enterprise business processes. The Engine eliminates the barriers of intricate workflow through enhanced transparency and communication. The tool links and supports stakeholders across finance, procurement, legal and other departments, resulting in more information to feed analytics.

Each of our solutions operates fully on its own. They become more powerful when integrated,

“Determine Engine leads to enhanced decision making, improved corporate performance and compliance, and overall risk mitigation,” explains Stakenas.

Determine is the confluence of three legacy “Gartner visionary” companies, Selectica, Iasta, and b-pack. Before the merger of mind and technologies, Selectica was a pioneering leader in Enterprise Contract Management, Iasta provided customers unprecedented situational awareness and control in strategic sourcing and supply management and b-pack transformed procurement from an operational service to a vital strategic role for organizations throughout Europe and the U.S. before becoming part of Determine in 2015. “It’s about solving real business problems and bringing together a new generation of innovative strategic sourcing, procure-to-pay and enterprise contract lifecycle management solutions supported with powerful business analytics,” says Stakenas.

While each customer’s request is diverse, Determine’s solutions have turned client challenges into opportunities to streamline contracting processes, sourcing and improve supplier relationships. When AOL separated from Time Warner back in 2009, the Procurement team at AOL had no visibility into spend structure and had no workflow. The manual processes and approvals were tedious and included long cycle times. The priority was to ensure new business units knew about AOL’s Procurement team and how Procurement could support the business unit’s needs. AOL finally opted for Determine’s sourcing solution, which gave the team visibility into every project they evaluated and performance metrics the team could use to evangelize their successes. By the end of Q1 2012, AOL had reached 100 percent adoption of seven new business units. With early success, the company t expanded into nine new business units by end of year and saved $29 Mn on $64 Mn of new investments.

Moving ahead, the company wants to utilize its expertise and experience to help customers successfully turn pain points into insights, and challenges into bottom-line results. “We will be constantly breaking new ground in contract management and source-to-pay solutions,” concludes Stakenas.