This week on the Procuretech podcast, I’m joined by Source-to-Pay (S2P) and implementation specialist Joël Collin-Demers, all the way from Montreal.
Source-to-Pay today – Market trends, Roadmaps, and Best-of-Breed vs. Full Suite
Today we’ll be talking about the dynamics of the source-to-pay application market, how to craft a transformation roadmap in that space, and where we see this market going in the future. But before that, I ask Joël to introduce himself.

Once he’s given us some fascinating insights into his favourite vegetable (it’s eggplant, if you were curious), Joël goes on to speak about his twelve years of experience in the procurement space.

He started off his career working for IBM, working on implementing procurement modules. He then progressed to implementing for direct and indirect materials, and looking specifically at source-to-pay applications that sit on top of ERP.

For the last three years he’s been running his own independent consultancy, addressing exactly the kind of issues we’ll be talking about today.
"Sauce"-to-Pay
Joël mentions the classic ‘pasta sauce’ metaphor for consumer choice: There was a time when there were only two or three kinds of pasta sauce on the shelf, and no-one felt bad about their decisions. Nowadays, breadth of choice creates option paralysis - it’s almost impossible to know if what you’re buying is really the best deal out there.

I point out that twelve years ago (2010) would’ve been around the time that Ariba, Coupa, Jaggaer - all the big suites - were just starting to mature and come onto the market. I ask Joël to talk about what it was like at this time, when all-in-one suites were hugely in vogue.

He mentions SAP purchasing Ariba in 2012. For a while they didn’t do anything with it, but over time they integrated. Adoption in the market for these big suites really didn’t begin until a little later, maybe 2015 - at least from what Joël saw in the Canadian market.

Many providers in this time were trying to buy up smaller solutions so that they could offer full suites covering the full procurement process.
Developing bespoke applications in-house. Is it worth it?
I bring up contract management and SRM, along with newer concepts like KYS. Going back to Joël’s “pasta sauce” analogy. I put it to him that I actually make my own pasta sauce - which, jokes aside, leads me on to asking if there’s any sense to companies building their own SAP tool.

Cearly this isn’t viable for mid market businesses, but at the enterprise level, does it pay off to build things from scratch. What are the pros and cons here?

Joël says that sometimes you need to make your own pasta sauce - on the shelf solutions might not fit your exact needs. Despite this, he’s never quite seen anyone build out their own application, in his twelve years of experience. But what he does see, is large amounts of customisation, or enterprises building out their own little bits of functionality that a core suite may be lacking.

He compares it to a pyramid. ERP is at the base, this connects to other functions, then you add applications for specific use cases to build on top of that, then you may go and get specific applications for one specific vertical.

If you can’t find something cost-effective on the market, this is when it pays to build things yourself. I ask if this is still a viable strategy now. Looking at Ariba and Coupa, and their app stores full of best-of-breeds that can be easily integrated, does this diminish the case for building an in-house app?

Joël thinks so. He expects to see a funnelling down of use-cases where building your own app will be a viable strategy. Niche spaces are being increasingly served. But then again, there are always gaps to fill. Niche apps are still being developed, and not every niche has been colonised just yet.
ERP, Data, and Single Source of Truth
I ask Joël if we still need all-in-one suites to provide a...