Note: This post is the transcript of the episode. If you prefer listening to audio, you can listen to the episode on the podcast page.
On the last episode, we explored the critical success factors for your Source to Pay system implementation. One of the factors that came up and got a strong reaction was vendor master data quality. Everyone agrees this is an important topic. However, when it comes down to the specific actions that should be taken to tangibly set yourself up for success, there aren’t many experts on the topic.
Today, I am fortunate enough to be joined by one of these rare gems. In fact, my guest today has built a company around the fact that being the master of your vendor information is the backbone of success in Source to Pay.
Stephany Lapierre is the Chief Executive Officer at Tealbook, a Canadian vendor network software provider based in Toronto, Ontario. Stephany and her team have been working since 2014 on putting together a platform that leaves your ERP vendor master in the dust. By doing away with limited and static vendor information and developing tools and processes to delivery up-to-date, granular and contextually specific information to buyers and sellers, Tealbook is making a name for itself.
While on this journey, let’s just say she’s gotten very intimate with the good, bad and the ugly of the vendor master. That’s why I’ve asked her onto the show – to discuss how companies can effectively cleanse vendor master data, how to measure progress and how to keep consistent vendor data quality levels.
We dive into the problems with traditional thinking about vendor data quality management and walk though the process and tools that can be used to really see progress on this front in your company.
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*The transcript from this interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Introduction
J: Thanks for joining me today, Stephany. It’s really a pleasure to have you on the podcast to discuss one of my favorite topics: vendor relationship and data management. It plays a big role in the success of folks in a bunch of different endeavors whether it be transformation projects or operational activities on the buy side or even the sell side for suppliers.
S: Thanks for having me.
J: I thought we could discuss what you guys do at Tealbook but also why vendor master data is important and why nerds like us in the procurement space get so excited about it. So, maybe we could start there. How did you develop such a deep interest in managing vendor data?
S: (laughs) I won’t bore you with all the details of what inspired me… However, let me share something that happened recently that was such a validation of what we’re doing. I was at a procurement conference and I was speaking to about 90 heads of procurement. There were some of the largest companies in the world. I asked one simple question, I said: “Raise your hand if you have some confidence in the quality of your supplier data.” Everyone laughed. Nobody raised their hands. They were all looking at each other, smiling. I said: “Raise your hand if you think supplier data is critical to the digital transformation.” Everyone raised their hands. I said: “Can we all agree that there’s a major data crisis and that we have a massive gap.” That led to, after my presentation, spending six hours at a table talking to procurement teams about what that actually means. I think that comes from the fact that if you look at the history of procurement, it has traditionally been a highly transactional function.
Procurement has always been about automating transactions or relationships; a kind of a layer with suppliers. But, suppliers are really critical to competitiveness. They’re really critical to an organization as much as their customers and as much as their [internal] talent. I mean, look at the sales and marketing side… They’ve been using data and analytics for a really long time. Even over the past few years on the talent side, you’re getting a lot of technology investments on big data to understand talent and trends to try to get the most out of your talent. However, very little has been done for suppliers other than software to try to automate parts of the workflow or a part of the transactions.
So, I think its left a really big gap for executives in organizations who are demanding speed, agility, innovation, competitiveness. Especially, now that so many industries are being disrupted. It’s really leaving procurement to think about how they are going to manage this transformation… How can they digitize the function in a way that’s scalable and brings more value to the organization? In that regard, I think what we’ve seen over the last few years is most procurement teams have run to P2P companies because they have been telling a good story.
I think there’s certainly a good story around adopting cloud based technology to help give you more visibility into process, invoicing, etc. However, its left a big gap on the data front. A lot of the “data thinking” has been done too late or has been overlooked. Mostly, it’s because it’s not easy to reconcile data. It’s not easy to be able to have the data that you need to feed those [Source to Pay] systems and to keep the data in those systems as relevant or accurate or transparent as it needs to be. I mean, a year and a half ago, we were doing webinars to educate procurement teams on what Machine Learning and AI means. Now, a year and a half later, we are talking about failed digital procurement transformations.
I think we’re coming to a point where there’s a big crisis and there’s a demand for a solution. Luckily for us, we foresaw this happening a few years ago and started building our technology so we could provide a data solution.
J: Yes! I can see that happening as well on the different mandates i carry out with clients. I’m curious to get your opinion on what the ideal state looks like? You’re saying it’s hard to sync that data across systems, and be able to have up-to-date data. What does that ideal state look like? Is it very accurate data for 100% of your suppliers? Is it for a certain slice of them? How can you tell yourself that you’re ready for source-to-pay transformation or implementing other S2P technology from a data perspective?
S: I think that data should come first. I think you should have visibility into 100% of the supply base. It’s been so difficult, I’d say even impossible, to maintain information in a way that was useful. Typically, we’ve had to prioritize suppliers which are more at risk or where we’re spending more. However, there’s now a lot of opportunities to get data for 100% of the supply base.
J: When you say maintaining that information was difficult, is it because the companies are doing that manually?
S: Yeah. We have customers who have a small vendor base but some who have 200K or 300K global suppliers. So, we’re talking about onboarding 200K companies, collecting data from those 200K companies, maintaining the records, validating those records; and some on an annual basis. Then you need to maintain everything about those suppliers like their category. How similar are they to other suppliers that you’re already doing business with? What is the level of risk? What is the level of performance and relevance and trust? Are they certified? For what? Is that record accurate, valid, reportable? There are so many components and all those components have been collected by companies but they’ve been collected by different functions across different systems.
The data stack has lived in those systems in a way that makes it really difficult for organizations to try to reconcile the data. It’s been done through data cleansing but then it only gives you your spend data. That’s a great snapshot but it’s not a dynamic record that gets better over time. It’s not a record that will give you insights so that you can start becoming more predictive, you can start foreseeing things that may happen or opportunities that you’re missing because you don’t have that visibility.
J: Yeah. And to add, you don’t have diversity information if that’s something you’re using as a criteria for spending decisions. Also, as soon as you have that data captured, it starts ageing and losing its accuracy over time.
S: The most amazing thing for us when we work with clients is getting a list of vendor masters, and [showing them the true picture]. Let’s use an example of a customer with who we recently deployed the solution . They said they had 19K suppliers. They shared the 19K records and, within days, we showed them that they actually have 5.9K companies in their file. You know there’s so much duplication [out there…]. 570 of those suppliers were duplicates and instances of duplication. So they had, in some cases, 30 different contracts across the different businesses for the same vendor and they were not aware of this. Sometimes, there’s good reasons for that. In others, there’s massive opportunities to leverage this information in negotiations to get economies of scale.
There’s also the opportunity to see what your accurate diversity data really is. This same company had a pretty strong diversity mandate but they were only spending 3% of their spend with small and diverse businesses. We were able to give them a pipeline of 84 million dollars of validated spend that could be contracted to small and diverse suppliers. We also found another 60 million dollars of potential pipeline that looked like it could be attributed to small and diverse but needed validation. With this information, you can start to be more proactive about realistically [achieving your targets].
In this instance, what was really interesting is that they had a very big focus on aboriginal businesses but only about $160K out of their $84 million dollars in spend was with aboriginal businesses. So, to be able to see that and say, “Okay, now we can take action” is great!
So, these are all snapshots… However, once you turn the light on to your data, you can see things that allow you to drive a strategy by seeing your categories. Because we look at 300 different dimensions of trends and similarities between companies, we’re able to show you clusters where you have suppliers that do the same thing or look very similar to one another.
Then you can start to look at things in categories. For example, we had a client who had two hundred something translation service suppliers. Those are all suppliers where you collect data, you maintain information, you validate records [over time], you pay separately with no economies of scale, and you still have people in the company going out to Google to find translation services for Spanish or Mandarin because they don’t know… They don’t have access to the information about who we already have under contract. You’re creating this unnecessary burden on the business, on finance and on legal, and you’re introducing unnecessary risks.
Seeing those clusters helps you execute or build your strategy and how you drive your technology [initiatives]. We also have an interface but the way that you can drive that is to consolidate [your spend amongst vendors]. How can policies and processes in each major category drive consolidation to make sure that we’re leveraging those supplies more effectively? Which ones are more valuable for what so that we can continuously deliver that insight to the business and reduce the cost, the risk, increase savings and build better partnerships?
There are also other categories where you see that you don’t have a lot of suppliers and sometimes with good reasons. Most of the time it’s complacency but if you’re saying, “Hey, we don’t have a lot of suppliers in these categories” you can look to a global network of clusters we are identifying. You will find clusters of similar suppliers that do the same thing and are doing business with companies that are very similar to yours based on what you’re buying. These could be clusters where your strategy should be about increasing competitiveness. You may adjust your policies so that you need at least three or ten or how many bids per sourcing event [to drive diversity in this category].
Another use case may be that you’re driving compliance around savings and creating that hyper competitiveness. To me, data should be at the core of your transformation and the technology should just be a way to drive compliance to be able to execute on that strategy. The technology should be adaptable because it’s going to keep changing. There’s thousands of niche new digital solutions that are coming to market. You need to be able to plug in those technologies to your data so that you can drive compliance. You need to be able to change and evolve with technology. I think is really critical to the future of procurement.
J: I agree with everything you’re saying… It’s scary. I think what you’re describing has been the “Holy Grail” as we’ve gone through these different generations of source-to-pay tools over the last couple of years. We’re also seeing constant consolidation in that industry as well.
People have been trying to consolidate their vendor data in their back-end ERP system or in their data stack somewhere. I’ve seen organizations try to do this in the middleware where all the applications can come in and query a single source of truth for vendor data. What are the common pitfalls that you see with those approaches and what are you doing with Tealbook from a process perspective to address those issues?
S: There’s a couple of angles to this. To quote one of our Fortune 100 clients, “We don’t want to collect, maintain, validate records of suppliers anymore. It’s really impossible. We want to be able to access the right data. We want it to be maintained, not because we’re maintaining it but the record is maintaining up to date. We also want that record to be validated not by a third party somewhere in a third world country, we want it to be validated by other buyers like us and we need the insight to drive our business forward. Our insight is very limited.”
So, when you’re building your processes and you’re adopting technology like a P2P, how is that data being cleansed, enriched, distributed to your system in a way that’s really effective and dynamic, and continuously refreshed? It’s impossible right now. It’s hard. So, the mentality of different companies is: “Well, we’re going to push that down to our suppliers. Our suppliers are going to do it so that we don’t have to do it.” Or: “we can hire a third party supplier to do it.” The reality is even the largest companies in the world will tell us, “We thought we were influential enough to get suppliers to do it but the reality is the majority don’t.”
That’s because suppliers have been asked to update hundreds of thousands of different systems, and each instance with the same software across their customers in ways that doesn’t really help their ROI. Yes, they’re motivated when it comes to an invoice but then you’re getting very limited information and even that’s hard to maintain… Banking information, contact information, etc. So, when you’re trying to manage all of the data at the speed at which things are changing in the market, it makes it incredibly difficult to track. So, we’ve taken an approach, obviously we’ve used technology to do this, primarily based on Machine Learning (ML) to proactively build records on each company in the world.
The footprint is expanding continuously because we’re always crawling and finding ways to find companies that are as similar and relevant to the ones that are already doing business with our customers. So, we work on breadth but we are also working on the completeness of that information; depth. We’ve built algorithms to be able to do this but we also need to consider how you layer that with customer data so that the structured data we provide becomes more relevant to them. If I want to sort suppliers by capabilities, by spend, by relevance to me as a buyer within my organization, by suppliers who have an MFA, by tiering them as preferred or strategic, and then layering other data sets around your diversity targets, or GDPR compliance, whatever it may be…
All that data should be coming together in one place and be useful. We do this in many different ways but mostly, it’s a combination of all of that, and the power to be able to have a record that continuously improves. That’s a big change from the past when I could buy data lists.
J: Something like Dun & Bradstreet?
S: Exactly. Then if you see records that are wrong, there’s nothing you can do about it. Then you don’t trust it… You’re going to react:, “This is garbage or I’m not trusting it.” You’re reporting using that data hoping the data is as accurate as it can be. You know it’s not good… It’s not perfect but you’re hoping it is. I think the big difference is when we’re working with customers, it’s a journey. Whatever they give us from their vendor masters is really bad. They all apologize, it’s okay, it’s bad. Everyone has bad vendor masters too. But, now we can “turn the light on” and add to it. Say you give us 2% of the completeness of all the information you need to know about a supplier, we’ll add 10% to that. We’ll add capabilities, contact information, location, certificates, relevance. We’ll add things that are really valuable to your business but now we may have 85% to 88% of completeness that we still need to build. That will depend on how you build your strategy, what systems you integrate, how you’re communicating with your suppliers. If you decide to roll out Tealbook out as an interface, and that’s an option, how are you rolling it out? What type of data or compliance processes are in place? How are your users interacting with the platform? All of that is to get to 100%. You’ll never get to 100% but you’ll never go backward.
J: You can get closer.
S: Exactly.
J: It’s so interesting that you mention that big organizations will push that task out o suppliers. The thinking is suppliers know their own information better than we do, so they should be the guardians of that information. But, at the same time, when you’re dealing with huge multinational organizations, it’s a collection of individuals and each individual in that company will know different bits and pieces. You might be talking with a supplier about another supplier in a competitive scenario and they’re both part of the same company through some structural device but they don’t even know it themselves.
S: They don’t even know their customer, right? The supplier may not even know their customers. There’s very little visibility.
J: So, if we can’t rely on companies to maintain their vendor data and we can’t rely solely on suppliers to maintain it either, we need a collection of everything that’s out there. Every little piece that everybody knows in the ecosystem should be consolidated to a central vendor master. At least that’s how I understand what you’re saying, right?
S: Exactly. That’s our thing. Tealbook has been named the source of [truth], the golden record, the digital vendor master, however you want to call it. We define ourselves as being a really smart supplier data cloud. Very similar to back when you had your phone and all your pictures and your contact numbers. You used to have to email people to tell them that you lost your phone to send their contact information again. (laughs) So painful. Now, all your data is in the cloud. So, no matter what laptop, iPad, latest version of an iPhone you may get, it’s just a matter of just connecting it to your cloud and then all the data gets populated. You’re not bound to the technology anymore.
You can actually evolve much faster and the friction and change in the technology is seamless. That’s the way that you should think about your data. How can your organization, how can procurement have really good supplier data that continuously generates more transparency and insights? Over time, you’re becoming a lot more strategic, you’re becoming a lot more predictive and you’re not bound to the technology.
Inevitably, each function will ask for the latest AI, contract management system; Quality will ask for the latest quality management system, and they all require supplier data.
How can you setup that new technology in a way that you can grab data to manage the process and update it with new insights while executing processes? Another important point is everyone wants to know that the supplier data being used is actually accurate and it’s updated. Every process should contribute to making your data better; not just consuming it.
J: Okay. Could I extrapolate that you see technology like Tealbook sitting as the single source of truth of that vendor master data and pushing updates to systems like your contract management system you were mentioning earlier to say: “Here’s the latest vendor master and here’s how you should update it in the system.” Even the fields that may be unique to that contract management system in the vendor master would be maintained in Tealbook or… How do you see that relationship?
S: Yeah. We are going into the deep, deep details. Typically it starts with [Source to Pay system]. What system are we using, how accurate is that data? How easy is it to distribute? Especially if you haven’t implemented your S2P tool yet. You’re depending on your system integrator to do that data cleansing and enrichment and distribution. It’s a high variable and it’s not really their strength. They’re really good at doing the implementation, the integration, the management.
J: Yeah. Design, build, deploy.
S: The data, it shouldn’t be in their hands. If you can remove that variable by adding a product or a solution, suddenly you have better data that’s easier to distribute. You will have a much more effective investment in your S2P system. In an example that came out last spring, I think it was the city of New York, they were $54 million over budget with their S2P implementation working with a system integrator.
A lot of that was caused by poor data quality – not because of the software itself. If you’re feeling like: “my neck is on the line, I want to make sure that my multi-million dollar investment and my S2P solution is effective. I want to ensure people are going to engage, that the data is going to be up-to-date…”, then that’s a really good way to start engaging with us. For example, we can look at data flows to an ERP that can be adaptable to all these different niche solutions that maybe you’ve already invested in or you’re looking to invest in the future.
[You need to ask yourself] how you are building a technology ecosystem that can plug in to the same data, and to your point, what fields need to be updated. It can be done. We don’t start with a full integration upfront. We typically start with let’s turn the light on to your data then we can partner with a change management firm or work directly with the customers if they have the resources to look at the data. Then, we start thinking about their strategy and how they’re going to roll it out and what they’re going to integrate with the data into… We’ll typically start as a standalone because you want that data to start getting better right away. You can export the data out of Tealbook and then update it to other systems as an interim while you’re figuring out what that integration roadmap will look like long-term.
Now, we’re also in heavy discussion, and moving forward on partnerships with S2P and P2P providers that don’t have a supplier ecosystem are looking for a way to generate more value. They want to remove that high variable in the implementation success: data maintenance. We can even help when it comes to supplier discovery, or onboaring vendors to a network or whatever you’re looking for to be more competitive. In this case, Tealbook would be integrated [out of the box] and it comes with your P2P or your S2P system. That’s the future for us.
J: Cool. The way I see it, to use your expression, “Turning the light on on your data,” feels like as soon as I import data into Tealbook, even if my suppliers aren’t logging in to add more info or I’m not adding more info, because of your machine learning algorithms, data is going to start getting better on its own, right?
S: Oh yeah, it’s really cool. In sectors where we have more customers, we use that community aggregated knowledge to give even more insight. So those customers get so much value because it’s beyond just what we were able to generate on their suppliers. We have that community insight that’s aggregated, so you don’t need each other’s data. It gives you more relevance, it gives you more analytics around benchmarks and things like that. And, the suppliers have been typically invited by multiple customers to come to the same place so if they update their certificate once, it’s updated for everyone. If it’s validated once, it’s validated for everyone. Now, you may be a company that needs the data to be validated based on your compliance requirements. Well, then you can validate it in Tealbook and the record is now validated twice: once for you and once for the community.
But, in sectors where we don’t [have a big footprint yet], we’re still able to generate a lot of value upfront. The way that we’ve approached that with chief procurement officers has been: “yes, you are the first one [in your sector] and we can generate a lot of value but now you can help us build that community data [with others in your sector].” We already have, for example, within a couple of weeks, three deals that are moving forward in a particular sector. We’ve got vendor masters from three companies that expand our machine learning extensively in those sectors, in those regions, in those capabilities. Now, those three customers are going to start really generating a lot of value [from the network effect].
J: And leveraging each other’s knowledge, right?
S: Yeah, and without sharing proprietary information. That’s really critical to our customers because we have clients in highly regulated or proprietary industries. They don’t want to share secrets but at the end of the day, they’re getting a lot of insights and value that’s so beneficial without feeling that they’re making their data visible to others.
J: Okay. Then what are the challenges you’re facing in developing this technology? I’m sure there’s issues and road blocks that are important like any new endeavor?
S: Well just building a tech company… We could have a whole other podcast on that subject… or ten. I built a consulting firm prior to this in procurement and doing change management, building procurement functions for hyper growth companies. And so, I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time but building a tech company is a completely different beast. Especially since I think we were probably a little ahead of the market. Because of my consulting background, I saw what was happening, and I was looking for solutions from my clients. How can we build this transparent, enabling, scalable agile procurement function? It’s like… “we can’t”. (laughs) You start introducing systems and tools and suddenly there’s no easy way to to reconcile the data…
I sat on the idea for Tealbook for nine years until cloud technology started becoming adopted, and a lot of the S2P software moved to the cloud. Then, I knew that there was opportunity to use big data. I didn’t know it was called Machine Learning at the time – that was four and a half years ago. So, building the technology itself, I was really fortunate to work with a lot of customers. Coming from the space definitely helped me understand the actual business drivers, the ROI, the use cases as to why you need good data.
Again, there’s a lot of magic with building companies. One of the magic moments for me: we had an MVP, we had six customers and a very small team.Our MVP was developed by a third party and then I met my CTO, Geoff Peddle. Geoff had worked at Google, he had done two Masters in computer science. His second Masters was in Machine Learning. Before that, he was building social media platforms using big data to make it really usable in the social media environment, and selling the analytics to media companies. Before that, spent 10 years at Ariba building the catalog and supplier network. Before that, he was at IBM, and he was in Toronto and available.
J: So, you had to jump on him, right?
S: Yes! That was really magic: to find someone that completely understood what we were building; someone that has all the different pieces that we needed to build our own data scientist team in-house, and build a software that was massively scalable that we could use with banks and highly regulated industries . There’s so many components that goes with that (security, scale, etc). Then the Machine Learning, it’s about data. I hear this all the time at conferences or when talking to procurement teams or even analysts that say to procurement teams that they should build their own data scientist team.
I always cringe because it’s really competitive to get really good data scientists. Data scientists, if you don’t know what that means, can be challenging to hire for and manage in a way that motivates them. For us, they’re really motivated because of the way our CTO manages that team. It’s very different than our software team. It’s more academic almost than project based.
When you hear [about hiring data scientists in organizations], it means data scientists are working on a small set of internal data. There’s not much that they can really do, right? Whereas, for us, it’s about continuously finding new sources of data. More, more, more!
J: Yeah.
S: We do a great job. We scour hundreds of millions of websites. We built it on the Google cloud, so we have access to a lot of data and Machine Learning. [For us], it’s about finding more sources that completes the buckets of data that we’re looking for. From more general supplier profile information to accredited data to vendor master data to risk data, we are always building that completeness of the record. So, to answer your question, the challenge is how do we find more sources of data and that’s what we continuously look for.
J: You’re saying you’d never get to 100% [completeness]. However, you must see that percentage grow over time not just within a specific client’s account but also within what you’re able to deliver to the clients, right?
S: Yeah, it’s so cool. For example, we have a client that’s a Fortune 50 company. The way that we started engaging is that I asked very simple question to the transformation team. I said: “When an employee needs a supplier today, what’s the process for that employee to start their project, whatever it is, to get that supplier on board to start working with them?”
The chief procurement officer spoke for like half an hour about all the things that they’ve put together to help that stakeholder get the information that they need through procurement. All I said in that meeting is that all of this, not overnight but over time with Tealbook will happen when I snap my fingers. There’s no reason why that employee cannot find all the information with the insight that they need to drive and make good decisions. That spiraled us to talk about use cases like okay, if you have the data, what’s the priority? Supply diversity was a priority.
We’re talking about a company that sits at the billion dollar round table; that’s been very, very well established with a 30 year old supplier diversity program. Still, they’re looking at 200K suppliers, and they’re like, “We think we’re missing some. The way that we’re doing this today, it requires a lot of effort. It’s very manual, so we also missing opportunities.”
J: It’s also based on the skill of the senior buyers they have on their team I would imagine, right? The relationships, the knowledge they’ve built over time?
S: Well, there’s software that does supplier diversity but they only do it for the suppliers that are uploading their certificate or they’re capturing certificates for. So, we did the exercise. When we started with them, it was clear that we did not have supplier diversity data at the time. What they said: “We don’t care but if you could get it and make the data better, that would be a first good use case to show us that you can improve the quality of our data over time.” They challenged us and so we started looking for sources of supplier diversity data. In 10 business days, were able to find over 800K small and diversity certificates, read those certificates, unify back to their profile, crawl all the information about that company and created almost 500K small and diverse business profiles that were available on Tealbook.
We matched it against their record and found 1600 suppliers that met the requirements that had been missed in their reporting. We improved their reporting by 20% in 10 business days. That’s crazy.
J: Those are all publicly available sources of data that you just started mining?
S: That was just the publicly available data. Imagine if you could tap into paid sources!
J: Yes, StatsCan or D&B, etc.
S: Exactly. In the US, it’s easier because those suppliers have to report at the state or the national or the city level. They have to either be registered with the government or they upload the actual accreditation certificate. It’s so much easier in the US. Canada is not as easy but we have groups of customers now that have [diversity] mandates and the challenge with the national associations is that although they do a great job of supporting the communities, which we could never replace, the databases are typically dated. If I’m a buyer, I have a [diversity] mandate for veteran owned, small businesses, woman owned, gay, lesbian, African-American, aboriginal, etc. Now, I have to subscribe to these national associations in order to get access to their database, and their database are not super awesome. I’m a buyer who’s just looking for maybe translation service or an IT consulting firm or an ad agency or whatever it may be. I don’t really care if I don’t have a strong diversity mandate. I’m not going to go to 10 different databases … Maybe my company pays the fee but it’s still a lot of time…
So, there’s a lot of limitation in scale. To be able to search for translation services [on Tealbook], I’ll go through the following process: I’m looking for translation services in Canada, ideally in Toronto. I’d like them to be woman owned. If they’re aboriginal owned as well, are they certified? Are we working with them already? I can search by spend, I can find similar companies who are certified, build a list in seconds. Then I can also show my manager, “Hey, every time I do a sourcing event, I’ve included all the suppliers based on my compliance, my [diversity] mandate.” I can actually be more accountable to it.
I think it’s a big mindset [shift] and it should be an opportunity for the national associations because if they’re in there, it adds more credibility; if I can sort by NMSCC or Reconnect or Rebank or VA or whatever it is. It just adds the fact that the certificate is now valid. It’s a credible source and it’s in the hands of all buyers and possibly employees that are not in procurement. Now, you’re completely scaling access to those suppliers in the hands of people making decisions every day.
J: Those people making decisions every day based on that data, do they have access to the source of that data? Where Tealbook got this piece of data?
S: Yeah. You can click on the links to the national associations. Right now, you can click on the FDA or whatever it is. You can see it. You can even click verify so then it’s verified for your entire organization as you do it, or we can automate that process for our clients if they don’t want to do it manually. Our clients can report the supplier diversity now on their dashboard. They can take their quarter and the classification based on their requirements, and it’s a click of a button to generate that report and submit it, which is, again, another game changing opportunity.
J: So, for people we’ve gotten super excited now (laughs), or maybe it’s just me, I don’t know… Sometimes I get excited about stuff that other people look at me funny for… What does an implementation project look like for a tool like Tealbook?
S: It’s simple. It’s really easy. To get started, we just need a list of vendor masters (addresses, etc). Ideally, we need more than a legal name for us to automate that process. If we don’t then we have to do some manual manipulation to make sure we’re getting 100% match. Our clients send out their messy files and we take it and implement. Then for the strategic component of it, I’d say we’ve been very successful more recently, is partnering with change management firms who are looking at the data.
They’re helping our customers prioritize and then build the strategies and processes. We did that initially but, we’re a tech company, so we’re not super equipped for that… We are building a more sophisticated customer success [model]. We really want to enable partners to be able to do it. We’re building partnerships where our partners can build some really nice businesses on the change management and the integration. However, tt’s nothing like what you would pay or the heavy lifting you’d have to do with the larger firm.
J: Like a manual spend analysis mandate or something like that…
S: Exactly. It’s simple. Then it’s really more about the change management and how you’re driving that change. In Tealbook, you have the data, you pick your filters. If you want to use our interface, it’s optional, you don’t have to use our interface. However, we find customers really like the interface. It looks like LinkedIn. So there may be a good use case for non-procurement users. We have a client who has 4K marketing suppliers right now: a large insurance company. They want to start using the interface to capture connections. They want their buyers to start rating and tagging suppliers and adding themselves as the category lead and start rating those 4K suppliers. That’s a really good use case.
A client who had Ariba said, “No, no, we’ve committed to Ariba, we’re not going to introduce another interface. We don’t want to confuse our buyers.” When they saw Tealbook coupled with the fact that they had really strong diversity mandate, they were able to roll it out to help those buyers find small and diverse businesses and that’s how it started. Now, they’ve expanded their use case to integrate their category strategies. All the preferred suppliers based on a category comes up first. Then they were able to use Tealbook to do that.
Again, they’re more strategic decisions on how you’re going to roll it out. For me, as a buyer, Tealbook is an app. As long as my company subscribes to it, I upload allmy contacts, I can add in all my suppliers and basically build a visual rolodex of suppliers. I can sort by who’s doing business with my organization, by spend, by geography, by diversity, by similarities. Then if I have the network, I can expand, find similar suppliers to the ones I’m already doing business with. If my mandate is discovery or innovation or diversity, it’s super easy to use.
J: So, if I’m a buyer, it would be as simple as calling up my favorite IT guy for my ERP of choice and get him to send me an extract of my vendor database to start? If my company’s subscribed to Tealbook, I can upload that data and start getting more insights.
S: Yeah. It’s really cool. We used to provide a report. Now, it’s in product, so it’s a dashboard. You see all your data come to life. You see how many unique suppliers you have. You see your diversity spend that’s validated. [You see your ] pipeline, the potential. You see by categories, clusters, unclassified with suggested classifications. The “wow factor” comes up front and then it’s driven through your strategy and how you’re using it.
J: Very cool. Well, I want to be respectful of your time. I know we’ve been talking for a while now. Is there anything that you want to leave with my audience or people listening now in terms of how they can reach you or anything you’re currently working on that would be of interest?
S: Listen, I really appreciate you inviting me to speak. We talked initially about not being promotional so I’m sorry it’s a lot about Tealbook. I’m just so passionate about what we’re doing.
J: No. It feels like you’re early in the market where there’s not a lot of players, right? So, when we talk about tools to address issues, well, your company is the use case to use, right?
S: I think the message for the audience is think about your data strategy.
Can you answer, with confidence, that you have good data or that even you have a data strategy? If the answer is no, really question why not. Question your leadership. If you’re an executive, question your team. Why don’t we have a data strategy? What’s our data strategy? How do we prepare for ever faster, changing environment and become a more value-add to the organization in a way that we can scale. I’d start there.
If you’re interested in contacting us, we’ve got a great team here that would love to dive more into some of your challenges and come back with the best way we can leverage our technology to help you prioritize those challenges and address them.
You can contact us on our website, tealbook.com. You can request a demo. I’m also very outspoken on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in following me, it’s Stephany with a “Y”, obviously with Tealbook. You can contact me. I’d be happy to have a conversation and make sure that you’re well taken care of and speaking to the right people on our team.
J: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for taking the time Stephany, I appreciate it. I know you got me excited on a couple of fronts that now I need to do further reading on. I’m sure it’s the same for the audience as well, so thanks again for taking the time.
S: Yeah. Thank you very much. Take care. Bye.
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Do you believe good vendor data is critical to reaching your digitization objectives? What hurdles have you faced on the cleansing journey? What lessons learned can you share? Let me know in the comments.
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Last Updated on January 6, 2021 by Joël Collin-Demers
