Xeeva
Better Visibility into Indirect Spend to Increase Profitability

Xeeva was born out of the simple, yet powerful, mission to help enterprises automate their indirect procurement process and manage spend by combining AI, industry insights, and domain expertise. Although the company primarily started its journey by catering to larger automotive clients in Detroit, it soon realized that every organization struggled to manage indirect procurement costs. Indirect spend management is critically important to companies due to its impact on operational efficiencies, risks, and profitability.

Today, Xeeva’s cloud-based spend management software suite has emerged as a trusted name for maximizing procurement efficiency and overall savings across different verticals, including automotive, consumer goods, industrial manufacturing, energy, and utilities, to name a few.

“Our cloud-based, integrated applications—Spend Analytics, Sourcing, and Procure-to-Pay—are powered by our proprietary XVA Platform, utilizing AI technology to equip procurement executives, CFOs, and CPOs with visibility and actionable insights into proven cost-saving options and best practices. The enhanced transparency into spend and standardization of categories and suppliers across multiple ERPs and locations can drive significant savings for a company,” says Nina Vellayan, President and CEO, Xeeva.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Vellayan provided intriguing insights into the company, the challenges that their clients are facing, how they are helping businesses to manage their indirect spend efficiently, and Xeeva’s plans for the future.

What are the key challenges that your clients are facing, and how are you assisting clients in mitigating those?

When compared to direct procurement, managing indirect spend is much more complicated for companies because the spend is often fragmented across multiple ERPs, locations, departments, and categories – making it hard to surface enterprise-wide savings opportunities. Most companies are spending 20-30% of revenue on indirect goods and services that are needed to operate the business such as travel, IT, capital equipment, labor, manufacturing, operations, facilities, and repair. This utilizes thousands of suppliers typically not on pre-negotiated terms to achieve discounts or bulk pricing to reduce freight costs and often occurs as a spot buy, which is the most expensive.

The complexity of indirect spend management has left many companies with vast quantities of siloed spend data that is incomplete, inaccurate, and imperfect. Xeeva solves the challenge by combining cutting-edge software utilizing AI technology, powered by our XVA Platform to cleanse, categorize, and enrich indirect spend data based on a customer or global industry-based taxonomy, providing up to five levels of granularity.

The cleansed data is integrated with our Spend Analytics application for easy visibility into actionable insights that surface savings. Companies can then realize the savings through our Sourcing software, whereby we manage sourcing events and e-auctions on behalf of our customers.

Once the suppliers are awarded the business and the items have been negotiated, new contracts and catalog items can be uploaded to our cloud-based Procure-to-Pay application that ensures compliance and internal policies are followed and provides a consumer-like shopping experience for mid-size and large organizations. The enhanced transparency and standardization of your indirect spend can drive significant savings.

Indirect procurement needs more attention than direct procurement to ensure savings are achieved, especially during the digital transformation occurring due to COVID.

Particularly, when organizations are striving to kick-start their business operations after months of lockdown, proper management of indirect spend has become imperative. We have designed our software to help businesses run smoothly under any circumstances.

For instance, higher freight costs, payment terms, purchase price variances, and working capital have recently emerged as significant hurdles for businesses. As a result, our AI technology has helped businesses identify opportunities to consolidate suppliers and purchase items in bulk to save on freight costs, move more suppliers to contracts to increase discounts, and manage payment terms to maintain additional working capital.

Please tell our readers what makes your platform unique.

Xeeva meets the challenges of indirect spend management with a team of industry experts in purchasing, data science, and engineering who continuously innovate to drive best practices throughout the procurement process. Xeeva is the trusted partner of top enterprises around the world, helping to transform their procurement processes into valuable procurement operations.

Xeeva’s use of AI and insights underpin all of our solutions, ensuring our customers have the best technology and thinking to support their goals. Most notably, our ability to classify, categorize, and enrich data at unprecedented speed, detail, and completeness provides our clients with a bedrock foundation for impactful and accurate decision-making throughout every step of the procurement process and ensures best practices.

Apart from the technology perspective, our software is a monthly subscription model, where clients don’t need to make any upfront investment. It takes only about four to six weeks to set up our platform and run it. After installation, every application is hosted in the cloud— meaning, the information can be accessed smoothly throughout an organization. Further, having integrations with a majority of the larger ERP systems, our platform complements an organization’s existing ERPs and does not require internal IT teams to overhaul their existing infrastructure.

Please tell our readers about the Xeeva Marketplace.

The Xeeva Marketplace offers our customers immediate access to a rich database with hundreds of thousands of highly-vetted, proven suppliers across a range of categories. This access ensures that our customers receive preferential pricing and payment terms that enable them to minimize spend.

Combined with our Sourcing software, our customers have access to a Xeeva resource that will setup and manage a single or multiple sourcing events or e-auctions. This helps drive an efficient RFQ process and reduce risk. Our platform allows for easy onboarding of suppliers into the Marketplace, creating a single source for all our customers’ purchasing requirements.

Xeeva’s Marketplace is an open, free platform whereby any supplier can easily onboard and have access to bid on sourcing opportunities managed by Xeeva’s buyer team.

It has been designed to provide every supplier with the ability to bid on multiple sourcing events at one time. Simply put, suppliers can access Marketplace, upload their catalogs, then undergo a comprehensive risk screening process, and immediately start bidding on projects. This supplier network will enable companies to access multiple approved vendors and purchase a product at the best price point.

Could you please mention a customer success story?

Several businesses leverage our platform today. One of our major clients is American Axle & Manufacturing, the manufacturer of automobile driveline and drivetrain components. The company was looking for an opportunity to reduce its operational costs by 20 percent. However, its fragmented data sets and multiple ERPS due to mergers were becoming a major hurdle to achieve this feat. Leveraging our solution, they have consolidated suppliers, improved contract terms, gained line-item detail on spend data, and now have proper visibility into the information spread across 17 different ERPs and multiple locations. As such, the company has been able to meet and exceed its savings goals.

Please tell our readers about the roadmap of the company.

Our company is always driven by innovation. Striding ahead, we are going to enhance the capabilities of our Spend Analytics, Sourcing, and Procure-to-Pay applications to provide our clients with better insights to surface savings and then help them realize these savings with our integration to our Sourcing application.

Adding to this, we are constantly developing our AI technology to ensure the cleansing, classification, and enriching of data is improving for our clients. Our Procure-to-Pay platform is constantly evolving, utilizing our AI to assist buyers with their purchases, ensure compliance, and reduce risk while providing a consumer-like shopping experience.