Published on the 17/06/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
A Melbourne-based university is the first user of a cloud based procurement service launched by Think, the brainchild of seek.com.au pioneer Adam Ryan…
The idea for a better procurement platform was conceived when Ryan, Think founder and CEO, was studying for an MBA a decade ago. He realised then that the procurement capabilities in enterprise software from the likes of Oracle and SAP were “big, heavy and costly”.
Maybe so, but it hasn’t stopped the software giants from taking a the lion’s share of the enterprise market.
According to a report released last month by Gartner, SAP and Oracle together control over 40 percent of the supply chain management (SCM) and procurement software market. Worth US$9.9 billion the global market for SCM systems is growing by 10.8 percent a year.
Think’s approach to the issue is quite different. It’s procurement cloud costs nothing for suppliers to use – which Ryan hopes will level the playing field for smaller suppliers – while buyers are charged, A$3, A$5 or A$10 an order depending on what they buy.
Ryan said that already 7,000 suppliers had uploaded their catalogues into the system, which is scheduled for general release in three to four months’ time.
He stressed that; “Think is not a marketplace, it is a platform to allow more efficient trading.” While there were already millions of SKUs available for buyers on the platform, he was eventually hoping for tens of millions as more suppliers sign up.
The Think Procurement platform is PCI-DSS compliant and can be used to store credit card details of buyers, allowing streamlined payment and reducing cashflow issues for suppliers, said Ryan. For other enterprises which may not wish to pay by card; “We produce a payment file and once that’s reconciled it can be pushed to the bank, or the ERP or the credit card for payment,” he added.
Think also links to cloud accounting systems such as Xero and MYOB to further streamline the procurement process.
Initially being sold to Australian users, Ryan said that the plan was to take the platform international from 2016. He said that as more suppliers and buyers adopted the platform, the costs to Think “drop dramatically”, especially once users are able to self-register.
