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Making the Case for the Suites – Jim Bureau of Jaggaer
Episode 37 • 18th May 2022 • The Procurement Software Podcast • James Meads
00:00:00 00:35:02

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This week our guest is Jim Bureau, CEO of Jaggaer. He’s carving out a niche for an all-in-one solution, at a time when best of breeds are gaining market share. I’m known as a bit of a best of breed fanboy, so Jim is stepping into the dragon’s den, here! I welcome Jim to the podcast, congratulate him for his bravery, and ask him about the challenges of offering a full suite solution in a tough market. Jim says it’s important to acknowledge that, while companies may want to commit strongly to either best of breed or full suite solutions, the reality is that most companies end up using a mix of different tech approaches. He goes on to talk about the importance of user experience. Whether a solution is best of breed or wider in scope, the thing that users pick up on is the experience. And that’s what Jaggaer focuses on. The future landscape for established suites I ask what Jim expects to see in the future for established suites like Jaggaer. Does he expect things to become more modular? Is that a direction he’s thinking of following with Jaggaer? Jim says that the reason why full suites exist in the first place is that it’s expensive to tie things together. He thinks that simplicity is key here, and that this question brings up two important initiatives for Jaggaer at the moment. One is creating an environment and ecosystem of partners that allows people to have suite systems while being able to plug niche, innovative vendors into that - quickly, easily and without requiring a lot of IT spend. Jaggaer allows customers to share third party modules and products that can easily be plugged in. Secondly, Jim is also working on something called Jaggaer Compose. This allows the customer and partner community to build out business processes that are specific to a niche or industry, and can then be shared amongst one another. He believes this will completely change the game on how people interact with these systems today.  It will officially be launched at the end of Q2. A Pick and Mix approach I ask Jim if he sees a future where customers can take a more  “pick and mix” approach. For example, let’s imagine a consumer thinks that an external spend analytics product is stronger than what Jaggaer can offer. Is that something that they could, as part of their RFP, specifically request?  Jim says that, for any CEO, no-one wants to forgo business! But he accepts that this is how most companies want to work. Jim has spent a lot of time and effort on Jaggaer’s autonomous commerce platform. Autonomy is important, and true autonomy comes from embracing sources outside of your own system - taking information from sources like TealBook or EcoVadis, and working that into your machine learning. There are so many sources of information out there, and you’re never going to own everything. I agree that you can’t be everything to everyone - Ikea makes great kitchens but you wouldn’t buy your white goods from them. Customers want to use specialists. I use contract management as an example, and Jim jumps on the opportunity to speak more about this… Contract management and acquisitions Jim says that contracts are something people often use as an example of an adjacent market here, but he’s spent a lot of time and effort making Jaggaer’s contract features as usable as possible.   He explains that he doesn’t want to force customers into adopting his contract module just because it’s there. By focusing on the user experience, and good application of data (from some acquisitions we’ll talk about in a moment..), he hopes that customers will gravitate to the best, easiest solution available - and if that’s Jaggaer, then great.   I ask Jim what drives his strategy around staying on top of innovation? How would he decide whether to acquire a company or to enter a strategic partnership like he has with TealBook and EcoVadis?  Jim explains that it comes down to comprehensiveness. Not just the comprehensiveness of the application, but the comprehensiveness of the user experience. If we follow a workflow, from start to finish through a b2b application, are we improving that workflow? The challenge in the SaaS environment today is that everybody wants an application that works just for them,  but they also want quick time to value. Jim says this is what Jaggaer Compose is all about: Allowing people to tailor their application to either their industry, their process flows, or their environment, without breaking the system when it comes to multi-tenant SaaS upgrades.

Investing in startups

I ask Jim if he also invests in up and coming startups, and he says that this would occur by way of his partner ecosystem - either revenue sharing, or from a support perspective. I then move on to the question of balance. How does Jim see the balance between features and cost, in terms of where the market is going? What sort of annual turnover would a company need to typically have for Jagger to be an attractive solution? Jim says that while this can vary, based on the industry, a good rule of thumb would be to see 250-300 million turnover as an entry point. Jaggaer does serve some companies below that threshold, but they would be something like pharmaceutical startups, which are unique cases due to their high profits and ability to scale explosively if successful. Jim shares an interesting statistic: Indirect materials only make up about 25 to 30% of corporate spend. Direct materials matters, and Jaggaer is the strongest player in the marketplace here. It's a very good space for Jaggaer, and something that Jim views as clearly differentiated, relative to the suite’s peers. 

Data management, pitfalls for large enterprises, and changing times

I ask Jim about data management. Aside from his acquisition of TealBook, what else is he doing to stay ahead of the curve here?  He says that this is one of the toughest aspects when making things work correctly. But he’s created an ecosystem of partners who, by working with them closely, enable a methodology for how data gets pulled in. In many cases, particularly at the enterprise level, companies will often have a separate MDM initiative that Jaggaer will then plug in to.  I ask Jim where he typically sees enterprises fail. Where do they get frustrated or fall down when it comes to digital procurement transformation? He says that something he’s seeing currently, is people not adapting to change. Between COVID and the recent geopolitical instability, what we're seeing now is a very different environment. Where people oftentimes historically have gone wrong, is by presuming that these changes are procurement issues, when really they’re revenue issues, or issues that affect companies on a broader scale. We should let more departments have a seat at the table, rather than limit the span of discussion to procurement alone. Span is important, and has a material impact on the success of adoption. There’s also the expectation of speed, due to people’s experiences in the b2c world. People are expecting Amazon-speed turnarounds on purchases - to be able to buy something and have it on their desk the next day. And if you can’t deliver on that expectation, you will struggle. That’s why Jaggaer is fully intending to deliver that.   I ask Jim where he’s seeing the most traction at the moment, in terms of business growth,  Jim says he’s mostly seeing growth in areas with complex needs, such as manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. He does also see some greenfield growth, but points out again that 75% of corporate spend is in direct materials. That market has historically been ERP run, but those ERPs don’t communicate with the outside world fantastically, so he’s seeing a lot of uptick in that space. To finish off, I thank Jim for his time, and ask where you can go to learn more about Jaggaer. 

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