Complex Categories

Another all-new edition of the Contingent Workforce Weekly podcast features a conversation with Rob Israch, Chief Marketing officer of global payables automation solution Tipalti. Rob joins me to discuss why payments (and payment management) are so critical in the face of incredible contingent workforce and freelancer growth. Rob and I chat about why payments are linked to the candidate [...]

What exactly is the ‘Future of Work’ and why are we discussing it on Payables Place? The ‘Future of Work’ originally started out as a concept, a discussion topic if you will. However, over the past several years it has become a movement that has dramatically transformed the day-to-day operations of the modern business. According [...]

Coupa Inspire was held last week, June 24-27 in Las Vegas at the chic Cosmopolitan Hotel and Conference Center. Ardent Partners’ analyst team was in attendance. During the conference, Coupa Software, the San Mateo, California-based provider of end-to-end spend management applications for the cloud, made many announcements  — most relating to its family of B2B payments applications, Coupa [...]

Many of the major shifts in the business world over the past decade revolved around the idea that businesses needed to “do more with less.” A decade removed from an economic downturn that forced enterprises to seek alternative workforce strategies vis-a-vis massive layoffs and organizational restructuring, there is one major fact that resonates with both [...]

Attention Shoppers! The day after Thanksgiving in the US has long been known as Black Friday, the dark name for what is generally considered the biggest shopping day of the year (truth be told, the Saturday before Christmas often wins this honor). According to the US-based National Retail Federation (NRF), holiday sales in the months of November and [...]

As summer turns to fall, like so many leaves will do here in New England, we at Ardent Partners wanted to take a moment to round up and highlight some of the major events we’ve got in store this autumn. With all the excitement over pumpkin spiced-this and cranberry-flavored that, it can be easy to overlook [...]

While the conditions outside may still represent the throes of winter, it’s never too late to look forward to the sunnier (and warmer!) days of spring. CPO Rising and Payables Place are excited to launch a series of articles that take a fun look at specific spend management functions through the prism of America’s favorite [...]

The first article in this two-part series highlighted the growing rise of mobile applications and solutions within the greater framework of complex spend management. Earlier, we discussed how mobile apps and technologies were revolutionizing both traditional and newfangled concepts within travel and expense management and contingent workforce management. Today, we’ll not only apply this thinking [...]

In the procurement and supply management world, buzzwords come and go every year. Some of these fresh happenings represent a true change in the business world, while others fizzle out as their corresponding strategies / solutions / technologies fail to make an impact. Few advances have made themselves as welcome in the business arena like [...]

There are many reasons why “complex spend management” (sometimes called complex category management or services procurement)  has been the focus of my professional career and why Payables Place (and sister-site CPO Rising) devotes significant space to the area. Here are a few: The categories often represent large buckets of spend for the average enterprise Many enterprises [...]