Can you introduce yourself, Suplari, and how do you provide analytics to your customers today?
I am Nikesh Parekh, co-founder at Suplari and our vision is to put the enterprise and the employee back in charge when dealing with their suppliers and help business leaders to have better spend visibility and operational agility in order to optimize costs, assure compliance and reduce both risk and fraud.
Suplari is an AI that leverages machine learning & AI. It achieves more actions and operates at different steps of the data treatment, and finance costs:
- Data integration: a quick cleanse using machine learning
- Normalization the company’s supplier data: as the data across several systems can be dirty it’s important to standardize it
- Categorization: to understand how you’re spending your money / identify & categorizing into buckets to help you look for cost savings
- Insights customization: this AI is a platform that customizes insights on top of the normalized datasets
If you have to summarize, what does Suplari do and when can your company help?
Okay, to be hyper-synthetic, I’d say Suplari:
- delivers analytics to procurement and finance team
- leverage the existing data that sits in the enterprise and help companies find opportunities to drive down spends / improve cash flows
- leverage machine learning & AI
Why offering analytics in your software was critical for your value proposition?
For me and obviously also the two other co-founders of Suplari: Jeff Gerber, Brian White, what was essential was to be a data normalization platform, a data science platform (insights & analytics) but also a workflow & collaboration, because we enable you to share the insights, send an alert, in short, drive accountability.
We started out trying to build an insight platform, and we needed data to cleanse so the analytics drove. Then, users wanted more than insights, they requested the analytics go beyond.
From our side, we deeply believed that analytics & insights will help automate workflow. So, it was a logical consequence that by increasing this workflow, we can hold stakeholders accountable.
How does the analytics feature impact your business growth?
As the Covid-19 is a challenging period for any, companies, business leaders were especially interested in finding fast solutions, so Suplari enable them to quickly get up and running tree core value drivers
- an overall spend visibility
- an opportunity to proactively find insights by scanning the data & highlighting opportunities
- using data to collaborate across the enterprise
How does the ANALYTICS FEATURE impact your business strategy?
If you want to know how the coordinated role of Product, Sales & Customer Success team does help us to address C-level stakeholders depends on the part of the product, because this is not the same users.
Plus, if you are a procurement manager, you may need to have quick insights into action. And if you are C-level executives, you’re certainly interested in KPI tracking,
in the core numbers and how you read your KPIs and how you connect them to the root cause.
As Toucan which is a great user-friendly data storytelling platform all about addressing the C-level executives.
What were the key challenges you faced when building your analytics feature and how do you iterate on it today to keep its value high?
We are clearly “customer-focused”, through platform and user groups because we realized they want to have more and more datasets. There two reasons to explain this choice:
- We are expanding different use cases, by building complementary insights for each use cases, so our product strategy is focused on the different dataset: purchases/expenses/travels
- The customers need to get value out of the solution, the use case the customer is driving value from
About Toucan Toco
Our mission: tell Business Performance Stories through interactive Data and Data Storytelling.
Our users: Marketing, Production, Finance, Human Resources, SalesForces, and Top management of Big Companies.
From 4 partners to 90 employees in 5 years, we were self-financed until 2019, thanks to the support of more than 100 clients, for more than 300 projects, including Renault, Crédit Agricole, Elior, Icade, Nexity, EDF, GRDF, BNP Paribas, Heineken, Marques Avenue, Euler Hermes, BIC, SNCF… We have completed our first funding from Balderton Capital and the former founder of Business Object to accelerate our development in the United States.
Small apps are mobile, easy to use, made for action, and easy to set up in any information system.
