Sourcing and procurement play a crucial role in every organization, helping mitigate risk, manage spend, improve supplier performance, and so much more. Even in today’s digital age, though, businesses continue to use legacy ERP tools, spreadsheets, emails, and other decentralized tools to manually manage procurement. That’s where Scout RFP comes in to provide much-needed capabilities of collaboration, real-time visibility, and data analytics that sourcing teams need to make the right decisions and grow strategic suppliers.
Scout’s Steady Rise: From Startup to Indispensable Sourcing Platform
When Alex Yakubovich and Stan Garber started their first company, a digital food ordering platform called ONOSYS (later acquired by LivingSocial), they experienced the pain of responding to RFP after RFP. They realized there had to be a better way to complete such a routine and ubiquitous business process, so they sought out hundreds of procurement experts to validate that hypothesis. A common theme quickly emerged: there was no solution that encompassed all the tools that businesses needed to make sourcing simple, smart, and streamlined.
After realizing they were not the only ones experiencing these sourcing pains, Alex and Stan set out to revolutionize the RFP and sourcing processes with the goal of making it much easier and more intuitive for all parties involved – sourcing, stakeholders, and suppliers. In 2014, Scout RFP was born with this mission.
Scout seeks to transform the way companies purchase everything by re-imagining how those that hold the keys - procurement and sourcing teams - fit into the equation.
Today, Scout RFP offers cloud-based sourcing software to make strategic sourcing painless for organizations of all sizes. Scout focuses on elevating awareness of how sourcing is such a tremendous source of impact for C-suites, the office of finance, sourcing teams, and stakeholders. Scout aims to transform the way procurement and sourcing teams function through its mission to make enterprise commerce faster, safer, and more transparent by being the single source of truth in sourcing.
Scout’s technology platform has won numerous awards, including most recently the Best Technology Partnership 2019 award with Biogen at CPO Rising 2019 and the SIG Future of Sourcing Award for Innovations in Supplier Performance Management with VSP Global. In July 2019, Scout was recognized among the Top 10 Auction Software Solution Providers 2019 by CIO Applications, reflecting over 4,300 total reverse auctions managed on its platform to date. Earlier this year, Scout was presented with the 2019 Supply Chain Operations Award from Unitywater, the progressive water and sewage utility based in Queensland, Australia and also received the 2019 overall award for Supplier Appreciation Business Productivity Tool from Palo Alto Networks.
Over 235 global brands including Adobe, Biogen, easyJet, Levi Strauss and Co, and Zappos trust Scout’s automated sourcing and procurement platform to deliver greater impact and better visibility with one collaborative platform. With Scout, companies in all industries, from technology to manufacturing to retail to healthcare, can easily collaborate, simplify processes, and source seamlessly to drive greater business impact. Scout’s global customer base extends to Japan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, India, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Colombia, and more.
Alex & Stan, Founders, Scout RFP
Scout: A Revolutionary Solution for Sourcing and Procurement
With end-to-end supplier engagement, sourcing project management, contract management, and reverse auction capabilities, Scout’s highly-rated sourcing and supplier engagement platform is easily accessible from any web browser and helps organizations achieve better outcomes and make bigger business impact. Organizations can easily purchase everything from insurance policies to office supplies – all on a single user-friendly platform. Customers regularly praise Scout for its simple, intuitive user interface and stellar customer and supplier support:
“It’s impossible to drive effective global collaboration using a standard spreadsheet. Having a sourcing solution in place is critical, because there’s always attrition. If you’re only using email to manage sourcing events, you’ll lose a lot of history when someone leaves—but having that history and visibility in a single, searchable repository can drive substantial long-term value.” –Neil Aronson, Head of Global Strategic Sourcing, Uber.
“Scout enables end-to-end supplier engagement, where you’re not only being more efficient, but can tap into that single source of truth for a powerful compliance audit trail.” – Harry Lund, Strategic Operations & Analytics, Biogen.
Scout’s number one value is to obsess over the customer; all Scout employees are devoted to ensuring all customers’ success. Scout teams are in constant collaboration with all customers to obtain their feedback, and hold an annual Customer Advisory Board meeting to discuss new product features and functionality improvements that customers request.
Another notable feature on Scout’s sourcing platform is the ability to fully configure user roles and authentication measures to ensure that the right people see the data they want to see at any time. The Scout platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services, which allows Scout to be entirely scalable and is secure enough to deliver the best experience for all customers. Security solutions include AWS Security Hub and Trend Micro Deep Security to complete customer satisfaction.
Additionally, Scout provides several tools to simplify data migration, including a standardized API and exclusively designed custom connectors for customers to integrate all of their data with Workday, Tableau, PowerBI, and DocuSign.
2020 and Beyond: Envisioning the Future of Sourcing with Scout
Headquartered in San Francisco with several locations throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, Scout is rapidly growing to help sourcing and procurement teams extend their impact throughout their organizations. Having expanded to over 160 employees, including a new Vice President of Talent and Vice President of Finance & Accounting, Scout strives to continually put their customers first.
As Scout looks to 2020, the company will continue to expand its platform’s capabilities through working with their global customers and identifying top development priorities. Especially key to this effort is Scout’s annual user conference, SPARK, which celebrates the impact and achievements of sourcing and procurement leaders and offers unique learning and networking opportunities. SPARK 2020: SPARK Your Sourcing Journey will be held at San Francisco’s iconic Pier 27, February 24-25th. Scout invites you to join 800+ sourcing and procurement experts for two full days of curated content, inspirational learning sessions, and a huge dash of fun – reserve your spot at SPARK.ScoutRFP.com today.
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