“And what autonomous commerce means to us is the ability to bring buyers, suppliers, partners, things together in a self governing, multi-tenant, SAS platform for end to end B2B commerce. And so if you think about what's required in order to get autonomous commerce, there's a couple of key elements of that, one of which is data.”
Stephany Lapierre welcomes Jim Bureau, CEO of JAGGAER, to the show to discuss JAGGAER’s partnership with Tealbook. They explore Autonomous Commerce, how COVID shaped the buyer and supplier relationship, and how they are designing responses to customer’s demands for time to value in applications.
In this episode, learn more about:
Jim Bureau came to JAGGAER most recently from the CRM space, and he shares with Stephany how the impact he saw made in customer service in the CRM space is what he’s now applying to the spend management space. Jim explains how he is working to shift spend management to Autonomous Commerce, which he defines as the ability to bring buyers, suppliers, and partners together in a self-governing multi-tenant SaaS platform. He stresses the customer’s need for time to value in usage.
Stephany and Jim reveal how the demands in their respective worlds - from procurement issues to collecting data to scalability - led them to their respective innovations and current partnership. Information, records, requirements, and automation are all necessary in enabling faster onboarding, better supplier experience, and reducing redundancy. This episode sheds light on truly exciting developments between Tealbook and JAGGAER.
About Jim Bureau:
As Chief Executive Officer, Jim Bureau is responsible for JAGGAER’s overall vision to transcend customer experience by providing intuitive and intelligent spend management solutions that allow JAGGAER clients to transform their supply chain. He brings more than 25 years of leadership experience, with his most recent role as Executive Vice President, leading JAGGAER’s Global Sales & Marketing initiatives. Jim came to JAGGAER from Verint Systems/ KANA Software where he was in the role of Senior Vice President. As an executive with KANA software Jim played a key role in successfully growing the company as it was acquired by Verint Systems for $514 million.
Prior to Verint/ KANA, Jim held leadership roles at Pegasystems, Shared Health, and Oracle Corporation.
He also holds a B.S. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.
Links:
Stephany Lapierre - TealBook: website | twitter | linkedin | youtube | instagram
JAGGAER
Jim Bureau on LinkedIn
Transcription:
Katherine McCleery
Welcome to Data Unleashed, a podcast that brings you insights from procurement's most innovative visionaries. Alongside incredibly brilliant guests, show host Stephany Lapierre explores the power of data, how it challenges us, and how you can challenge the status quo. You'll be inspired, but more importantly, you're getting actionable advice in every conversation that will help you unleash the power of data in your own organization.
Katherine McCleery
Welcome to the show, we're on episode three of Data Unleashed. I've got Steph Lapierre of TealBook here with me. I'm Katherine McCleery. And today's guest is a special one to TealBook. Steph, let us know who we've got on today.
Stephany Lapierre
Well we're talking to Jim Bureau, he's the CEO of JAGGAER and Jim and I got to know each other over the last couple of years. JAGGAER had approached us a couple of years ago to better understand the vision and what we were working on and our position in the market. And we have a lot of partners, but he was definitely at the forefront of looking at how can data contribute to his vision of autonomous commerce. And what's interesting about Jim is that it's the first time that he's been in procurement. Prior, he's been a CEO and an executive with lots of experience, and prior to that he was working more on the other side, on the sell side. And there's a lot of parallels that we see that's migrated from sales side to buy side, which is procurement, over the last decade that we can learn from. And both him and I agree that when you look at what happened just over a decade ago, Salesforce came out, suddenly this, you know, this cloud based CRM system was going to fix customer data, everyone was going to have access to the customer source of truth. And in reality, it made it easier to implement, it made it easier to get all the updates versus on premises, but actually, the data didn't get really good unless humans, people, employees, maintain the data. And what we saw as these newcomer platform, as technology evolved, that were focused on aggregating, collecting information on businesses, in a way that they could feed that data into Salesforce to improve things like contact information. And as contact information became more automated, it improved sales and marketing outcome and business development. And that's where Jim, his lens came, like 'Hey, when I entered this new world of procurement, I was shocked to see how far behind the technology stack and the innovation versus on the revenue generating side that has already been over a decade'. So what can we learn and apply from what happened on the sell side? And how can we migrate this to the buy side, to enable procurement teams to be as agile, automate the things that are tactical and low value, so that we can focus on more strategic drivers. And to his point, how do we get, you know, the seat at the table is by delivering value and by contributing to those core business objectives. And so our visions really marry what's been done in procurement, building software solution to collect in workflow processes. And that's been done well, and there's a lot of competitors, and it's a pretty crowded space. Where he's taking JAGGAER is more on this, how can we further automate some of these processes to make it more autonomous? And then how do we bring data to ensure that, you know, the things about collecting information - asking suppliers to populate their profile, asking employees to validate, you know, manually, or collect records manually - how can we bypass this so we can marry the best in breed of software solution with the best in breed of data platform. And so our partnership with JAGGAER is one that's been very successful. Lots of excitement on both sides, lots of success story of customers that have now embraced this marriage between the software to autonomous commerce vision, and what they're delivering to their customers to TealBook's vision on autonomously enriching supplier data. To remove a lot of the manual process to collect, enrich, distribute data, and also to reduce the burden on suppliers to maintain the same information across multiple portals. And so our long term vision is very similar. How can we make the experience easier for suppliers? How can we remove this barrier that has been put upon them to bring this, like, they call it portal fatigue, right? So if suppliers are not coming into a portal, they're not putting the information, and you don't have other ways to autonomously enrich the information in the portal, and you're going to build your transformation and you're going to make decisions without having all this good data that can drive so much value out of your investment in systems.
Katherine McCleery
What I love about this conversation with Jim is that he really does bring that sell side perspective that procurement has been needing for years and years, and creates an incredible product on the procurement side with the same kind of vigor that the sales side has had for so long. So here's my favorite little snippet - and I won't give away too much because this is a great episode with Jim - but, you know, he mentioned, 'Hey, procurement hasn't changed all that much', as a CPO why do you have a seat at the board table now? And he said, 'Well, because it's impacting top line revenue, and they want to know how I'm going to, how we as procurement, are going to fix it.' So in a nutshell, he really gets into the core of that for procurement, with such an incredible set of experiences from years before. So I hope everyone enjoys this one. It's a deep dive. And I know that you and Jim really get into the partnership. But you also talk very high level about the future of procurement, and how this new approach, the CRM approach, essentially for autonomous commerce, is changing the way that we do procurement.
Stephany Lapierre
And if we go back to Elouise Epstein's spider chart, it actually makes what she's talking about real. Like, our partnership, and the fact that we can now enhance data in JAGGAER so that the customers of JAGGAER can benefit from better data on more attributes across all of their suppliers, it's really kind of more than making that vision more tangible. And it's so amazing that JAGGAER is one of the first ones who've embraced that partnership and that marriage, and we are driving a lot of value. And we're seeing a lot of growth and successes within a relationship and a partnership.
Katherine McCleery
All right. Well, without further ado, let's jump right into that interview with Jim.
Stephany Lapierre
So Jim Bureau, I'm super excited to have you on the Data Unleashed podcast. This came about during COVID, where I was connecting with customers, thought leaders, partners, and we're having such fantastic conversations. And I thought, not because of what I had to say, but more what I was hearing, especially that things were happening so fast, that I thought your industry would love to hear these types of conversations. It took about two years to finally bring this up to life, you know, busy growing a fast-growing company. But we finally put our act together and started to host these conversations. I'm particularly excited to have you, Jim. First, we got to know each other a couple of years ago. I think from a culture perspective, too, I see a lot of familiarity. I know your team, you've got a great team. There's great energy. Also that we've been exploring how can we partner together and really be part of this autonomous commerce that you're building with JAGGAER? So let's take a step back. We'd love to hear more about your career. What brought you to become the CEO of JAGGAER? And we'll go from there.
Jim Bureau
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Stephany. First of all, thank you for having us, it's always great to chat with you. It's been a good run up until, you know, our engagement here, which has been terrific over the course of the last few years. Just quick background on myself. I mean, I've been in enterprise software space for, sadly, it's going on 30 years now, in a variety of different roles and positions, I sort of covered everything from ERP to business process management. Most recently coming from the CRM space. The CRM space was of particular interest. Because if you think about why people engage in CRM, it's really to make an impact on the customer experience and how people are interacting with one another in order to, you know, achieve a certain objective. And I come upon JAGGAER, which is in what has historically been known as the spend management space, and honestly, when I look at it, that space has been there for quite some time, it's going on almost 30 years now. And needless to say, the customer experience, in my opinion, wasn't really where it needed to be. And so, you know, we've come on board and really tried to shift from this notion of spend management to autonomous commerce. And what autonomous commerce means to us is the ability to bring buyers, suppliers, partners, things together in a self governing multi-tenant SAS platform for end to end B2B commerce. And so if you think about what's required in order to get autonomous commerce, there's a couple of key elements of that, one of which is data. Right? I can't automate anything if I don't have the appropriate data, it's available to me when and where I need it, so that I can apply machine learning to it, apply artificial intelligence to it, and scale things. Hence, the introduction to TealBook and how we got introduced to one another. So you guys, I believe, have the same goals and objectives, which are how do you automate and bring things at scale with supplier management and buyers together so that they can transact business in a much more efficient manner? And that's how I ended up at JAGGAER and we're excited to really change the world to autonomous commerce.
Stephany Lapierre
I find it super interesting that you come from the sell side and we'll probably talk about this a little bit. But the sell side, to your point, was much more advanced. Right? We're talking Salesforce is - I don't actually know when Salesforce was born - but the focus on enabling sales and marketing team to make better decisions that would significantly impact with top line revenue is so far behind on the buy side. And we see now a lot more excitement in the last, I'd say, three to five years around how the buy side is catching up and started thinking about better buyer experience, better supplier experience, autonomous information. But I'd love to hear, sort of, as a CEO of JAGGAER, you're coming into 27 year old company, right, who has been through a lot of transition, what has been that experience and what's the biggest lift to get to that autonomous commerce vision?
Jim Bureau
I love going out and talking to customers because you get to hear sort of first person real world events that are happening. And one of the things that every one of our buyers struggle with is, you know, this space has been here for quite a while. And it's actually quite amazing to me that this day and age, you know, what inevitably, they all come back with is, I put the application in, and I've got, take your pick 50,000 / 60,000, some cases, 100,000 suppliers that I needed to get from point A to point B, with clear, accurate, updated information. And they struggle with that. And ultimately, what our goal is, if we're going to help those both buyers and sellers have a better, tighter relationship that is automated wherever possible, we need to be able to scale it so that they can actually work with the volume of suppliers that people are seeing today. You guys have probably seen it as much as we have, you know, there's been quite a big shift that's occurred over the course of the last 18 to 24 months, around the number of suppliers that buyers are engaging with. And a lot of it's come down to, you know, where the market has evolved to in dealing with supply chain issues. And so the real question there becomes, how do you scale? How do you scale it so that you can, in turn, automate it?
Stephany Lapierre
Well, that's the old thing, right? My inspiration for TealBook came in the early days where large Fortune 100 company was saying, like, we want to reduce our supply base by 50%. I think that was the goal for the last, like, 20 years. And the reason they were doing this is because it was costly to maintain all this information on suppliers. So there's a cost to maintain the record, whatever, whoever decides what the cost is, we've seen from $500 to $2,400 per record, which is a lot of money, especially if you have 100,000 suppliers. So it's been a logical thing to say, especially if you want to leverage existing contracts so that you can get economies of scale, it's kind of the old way. But what we've seen in some of the articles that you guys have published recently is, like ,that diversification. And the scalability. It doesn't matter how many suppliers you have, right, as long as you have a well distributed, diversified supplier base. And if you can automate a big part of that, then the costs of maintaining records should actually not be getting in the way of that scalability.
Jim Bureau
We actually did an article for the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. And the reason why they were talking to us, is we noticed a pretty material shift in how people are going about and building their supply chains. And part of the reason that came about, if you're a CPO today, think about the things that you're having to wrestle with, right? So you've got COVID, if you're in China not only do you have COVID, but you have lock down. So, like, physically nobody is in the plant, building, anything or, for that matter, shipping anything, which raises the issue of transportation logistics. So not only can I not get the product out, once I do get the product out, what we've found is it's taking twice as long to get product from Asia Pacific to the US today. And it's costing me twice as much to do it. And so if you're a CPO, you throw that on top of the geopolitical issues that are arising, inflation that's arising, ESG, right? So they're trying to do things responsibly now, to where, you know, they're tracking carbon emissions. And they need to know that. And so what we're seeing is a shift from organizations who have been consolidating on a global scale to nearshoring. And part of the reason they're shifting to more of a nearshore is, you know, at least in our space, we do a lot of work with manufacturers and consumer goods that need to have things produced, and those are goods and services that go directly related to top line revenue. And when you can't get your top line revenue goods in the hands of your customers, it has a direct impact on your revenue.
Stephany Lapierre
And that's when the executive team really care about procurement.
Jim Bureau
That's exactly right. So then all of a sudden, it's not really procurement, it's supply chain. And it's-
Stephany Lapierre
Survival.
Jim Bureau
Yes, it's survival. Precisely, right. And it's a totally different conversation. And it's interesting you bring that up, because I've asked people like, hey, procurement hasn't changed all that much. Why, as the CPO, why do you have a seat at the board table now? They're like, because it's impacting top line revenue. And they want to know how we're going to fix it. So you nearshore and what's happening was when they're nearshoring, they're not so much severing those previous relationships, is they're growing those relationships so that they can have more resiliency in their supply chain. And when you do that, you need to be able to manage the volume at scale, which is, hence where TealBook comes into play for us.
Stephany Lapierre
Well, it's building contingency. It's diversification. And then, as you pointed out, the kitchen sink of added requirements has been thrown at procurement over the last couple of years since COVID and it's not going to stop. It feels like it's just the beginning. And when I talk - and I was in the UK last week speaking at supply chain live - and you hear all the requirements that need to be collected, and what procurement teams are doing, and when you ask, like, do you even have good quality, complete supplier data on your tier one suppliers today? And what are the challenges of collecting that information and having visibility, they all laugh, they all smile, because they know it's really hard. So we haven't quite figured out, like, how to get tier one visibility across our existing supplier base. And now we're being asked to expand, to be able to find contingent suppliers, to diversify and redesign our supply base. We're being asked to figure out how to standardize and report on ESG requirements that the board cares a lot about. So, you know, you're seeing the added requirements. And my empathy with procurement is where do you even begin on this journey, if you haven't had quite the opportunity to get your hands on it, and this is every single organization in the world, there's nobody that's uniquely, like, just doing this in an amazing way yet. Obviously, we're looking to change that and bring a lot more visibility in automation, and the way data is collected on supplier, that's what we're focusing on and spending a lot of the investment, and how can we feed that data to complement what JAGGAER is already working on? And you're collecting a whole series of other data that's incredibly useful for the buyers to understand trends, and being able to automate some of the decisions that they need to make to deliver on their business objectives.
Jim Bureau
Yes, absolutely. And we're seeing... it's just fascinating, over the course of the last 24 months, how those trends have shifted. The other thing that we're finding is, the speed at which the shifts are changing has changed drastically, right? It used to take quite a bit of time in order to identify a supplier, onboard a supplier, and then get them productive. And people are having to do that in a fraction of the time now.
Stephany Lapierre
100%. Onboarding, right, is so key to business outcome and figuring out how to do that faster and with better information so that you're reducing your risk, because risk is the other hot topic right now that everybody's talking about. How do you monitor risk, how do you stay on top of risk, and which risk? There's, like, a dozen different risks that you need to track. And so I want to talk a bit about our relationship because you and I have a similar sort of vision when it comes to the supplier experience. And so for one, our relationship, again, this is a journey where we are feeding some records that we're autonomously collecting, that we have high quality, into JAGGAER, so that when customers are using JAGGAER, there's some records that are auto populated. Records are typically hard to find or hard to collect, especially when we're talking about small, diverse local businesses that they may not have the resources to maintain all these different portals. You know, the intent and the hope is that we can have an interchangeable data set. So as we're continuously to go on our journey to collect the completeness of supplier information, that we're able to feed more and more to JAGGAER, increasing time to value, increasing compliance and better outcome for customers who are using JAGGAER specifically. But on the flip side of this, we talk a lot about supplier experience, right, and being a good customer to supplier is becoming more and more important, especially when we're in a competitive environment, especially when there's pretty lofty goals around small diverse businesses, and you can't crush those businesses, you have to enable them and champion them and nurture them and make it easier to do business with them. And so those are all considerations, but in our vision - and I remember when we spoke, I don't know a year ago about this - is there an opportunity to have interchangeable information, and we're not there yet. This is, again, we're talking a bit more vision, but having the supplier coming to JAGGAER and being able to auto populate all their information that it's 80 to 95% quality, be able to make adjustment to those records, and then get that data to be redistributed into other modules or version.
Jim Bureau
Yeah, so you just hit a super hot button for us because one of the things that customers demand and expect today, is time to value. They don't want long implementations. Usually when you're paying a subscription model, they want to see value immediately. The other thing is they don't want to have redundancy. So if I'm a supplier, I want to be able to go update things one time and have it propagate. At JAGGAER we did a study - we've got approximately 5 million suppliers on our network - and we did a study a few years back with those suppliers and interviewed him as a supplier, what are your pain points to working with the buyer community? And likewise, we did the same thing with the buyers and got that feedback as well. And the biggest stumbling block in that interaction was redundancy and having to do the same thing multiple times.
Stephany Lapierre
And we can relate to day to day ourselves, right?
Jim Bureau
Absolutely.
Stephany Lapierre
I got three kids, I go to eight different camps and activities in school, like, can you build something for me to just automate that process?
Jim Bureau
Yes, yeah, you go to the doctor, I swear, I just filled this out yesterday at the doctor across the street. So yeah, absolutely. And so people don't want to do that. They don't like redundancy. And it goes everything from, you know, in our world, I don't want to be redundant on filling out RFPs, I just filled the same one out yesterday. I don't want to be redundant in filling out supplier information, I don't want to be redundant in filling out payment information. We talked a little bit about, you know, the growth of people's supplier base, you gotta have to do that at scale. And you can't scale that in today's world without automating the process.
Stephany Lapierre
Oh, not again, with the number of requirements that are upon procurement to keep track of, to report, the benchmark to consider in sourcing events or the lifecycle. And we do have a slide on this, where you're looking at this lifecycle of a supplier, and how many functions of the organization and impacts and poor data can cripple a lot of those activities, and, frankly, the ROI into the software solution that works at capacity on the IRR when the data is good, right? If you have data gaps in the software, you know, I would say discount the software by - I don't know, you probably know this - but I'd say 50% maybe. And so getting better data in an autonomous way. And I think the flaw that I see, and you and I've talked a little bit about this, and I think it'd be interesting for the audience to hear, is the analogy to Salesforce. Right? And we're, 15 years ago, do you want to tell it, you go ahead, you tell the story.
Jim Bureau
Coming from the CRM space, one of the things that everybody struggles with is how do you get a sales rep to, like, fill out data? They just don't like to do it, they're not very good at it, it's not accurate, it's not updated. Well, imagine, right, a world where you can actually pre-populate the data, not only could you pre-populate the data but then you could hand it over to the prospect, or buyer in this case, and go, Hey, do I have this accurate? And let me allow you to self service so that you can make sure that I'm getting, like, wouldn't that be the panacea of sales? Now, flip that analogy over to what we're dealing with in autonomous commerce. Right? And so that's why this becomes so incredibly important to us. Because I believe that we actually have the ability - or we're getting closer, let me rephrase that - we're getting closer to the ability to sort of get to that panacea of being able to automate that in a much more efficient manner than we historically have.
Stephany Lapierre
And there's two things, there's the automation of a workflow, right? And then there's the automation of the task itself. And that's where a lot of our research has been, could you make the supplier come in and do the exception versus the rules? Right? Can they see this pre-populated profile with all the information that is available, that we've been able to collect, and we've able to enhance through having, you know, historical data, possibly, or even insights and ties a supplier to see more value than just filling up, you know, a portal.
Jim Bureau
Exception handling is relatively easy, but getting them to fill out a, you know, a 30 minute form, a little more challenging.
Stephany Lapierre
It sounds like with the CPO today, I was a judge at a digital procurement world and there's all these pretty cool solutions that are coming to the market that JAGGAER's not touching, right? There's a plethora of niche solutions that are going kind of far into circular economy and plastic marketplace and things like that. And so when I look at, you know, for ESG specifically, if you were to - depending on how you're going to be building requirements - you may end up with 5 to 25 different niche solution that you'd have to kind of bolt together on top of your SDP. Right? And so when I start asking those providers who give you 100 reasons why the suppliers will come to their solution, like, how are you getting the data and they tell you that the suppliers are going to come in and do this by the third company, the CPOs on the judging panel start catching on, they start asking the same thing, like, Hey, how are you going to get the data? And then suddenly it's like the light bulb. Wow, I've got, like, you know, five, I've got my legacy systems, my core platform, I'm going to buy these niche solution, but then - what? I'm going to ask my suppliers to also come to these other providers versus just being able to connect it to your legacy systems, to your core solution and be able to optimize the information across that. That's sort of the future state when we're looking at this growing ecosystem. And I don't think JAGGAER thinks, like, you're the only platform that the enterprise will be using, right? It's a core platform. And there's a very strong value proposition, but it's part of an ecosystem.
Jim Bureau
I think that, though, the enterprise software space has tried to capture market share by saying, we're going to create a well functional, closed environment, that as long as you have our platform, things will be fantastic and great. Well, then there's a reality, right? The reality that even if I wanted to do that, I'm gonna go acquire someone tomorrow, who's going to have a different platform, a different environment, and guess what, best laid plans, you know, need to be altered, like, overnight. And so one of the things that we've really been attuned to at JAGGAER is, we absolutely would love people to have our entire platform and yes we think it's optimal when that happens, but we also know that that's not oftentimes not the reality. And so creating an open environment where people can pull in different pieces of requirements, right? You know, if you're working in the pharmaceutical space, right, there are certain things that you need to be able to pull into that mix. You work in manufacturing, there's all sorts of different niche environments which you pull in. One of the ways that we connected with you guys was this notion of creating an app store where it's easy for someone to go and go, yes, I need to be able to pre-populate my suppliers. What's the easiest way for me to do that? I can go plug TealBook in and it just works, right? Because that's what their experiences in the consumer space are now, right? So people have that expectation, and they should have that expectation in the B2B world. It's no different.
Stephany Lapierre
Yeah, when you look at the architecture of today, it's just been very disparate. And to your point, so end to end or all one platform, that's changed, and there's no going back, right? And so I think living in that ecosystem is so important for companies, legacy companies, especially, like, you look at JAGGAER has been around for 27 years, is how do you evolve? How do you create the best value for your customers? And how do you evolve into this ecosystem? Which we're super happy to play a part of that. Anything else that we should know? Where's JAGGAER heading? What's exciting? Other than our partnership, of course.
Jim Bureau
Yeah, we have the TealBook partnership, which has been fantastic. We've been working together for, you know, several months, or maybe even a year now. But we've formalized it, making it easier for the customer. So we're super excited about that.
Stephany Lapierre
And just to clarify, we are pushing certificates. So if you guys wondering like what is TealBook and JAGGAER doing, the journey starting with diversity certificates, which we autonomously can enrich. So at a scale speed that it's very hard to depend on suppliers to come and put their certificate in a portal. So baseline, and then we're continuing to enrich their profile. Because I believe we are enhancing discovery. Hopefully, we are doing that at some point. And then, obviously, to have the plugin to auto populate JAGGAER supplier record is sort of the dream. So we're going to keep working towards that.
Jim Bureau
Right, right. No, that's right. People will be able to actually see this. We have our user conference coming up in October in Nashville, Tennessee.
Stephany Lapierre
Great town. We'll be there with flying colors.
Jim Bureau
Yeah, nationals that happen in place these days. But yeah, we're super excited about that. You know, we've got some really exciting things coming around the autonomous commerce that really will close the gap between that buyer experience and the supplier experience. TealBook, certainly one of those being able to close the loop on RFP issuance, as well as responses to buyers and sellers. So we're excited.
Stephany Lapierre
We're super excited to continue to expand our partnership. And so, Jim, such a pleasure seeing you again, as a CEO looking at someone who had such a successful career to be able to scale a company so successfully in different sectors is, you know, very inspiring. And so I hope to continue to learn from you and make our partnership a great success.
Jim Bureau
Well, thank you for the invitation. It's always a pleasure to chat with you and look forward to seeing you in Nashville.
Stephany Lapierre
We'll be there. Okay, thanks, Jim.