SAP Startup Spotlight: Per Angusta

Per Angusta is a cloud-based solution for procurement performance management (PPM). The platform provides increased visibility into the strategic sourcing process, enabling better collaboration and transparency. With nearly 17,000 users in more than 100 countries, Per Angusta enhances the value that procurement teams can offer by tracking savings, bridging the gap between purchasing and finance, and aligning stakeholder goals.

Selected by SAP as one of the eight most innovative startups in the European procurement and supply chain sector in 2020, Per Angusta addresses the needs of businesses of every size, enabling their teams to be more agile and productive. Enhanced visibility into team performance and improved reporting let teams focus on the strategic side of procurement, creating value and innovation for their stakeholders. In this interview, Pierre Laprée, founder and CEO of Per Angusta, explains the value of a procurement performance management approach and why organizations should rely on a wider and complementary technological ecosystem to accelerate procurement’s digital transformation.

E-3 Magazine: How does your solution work?

Pierre Laprée: Per Angusta is a web platform that enables our users to structure their daily activities in a more efficient way, prioritizing sourcing projects in their pipeline, and setting agreed savings targets with finance. Through Per Angusta, buyers can track and share procurement activities, having a single source of truth to communicate indisputable data that demonstrates how procurement is contributing to the business. Using real-time savings forecasts, procurement teams can also generate reports that are easily understood by every stakeholder. Using our in-app sharing feature for documents and comments, buyers can collaborate in real time and engage transparently with their peers, especially in a very decentralized context. Per Angusta also enables users to centralize contracts and supplier data and connect their existing tools (e-sourcing, spend analysis, etc.) or content providers (credit scoring, CSR rating, cyber risk assessment, etc.), all in one solution.

What are the customer-side requirements? Do they need any special technology to use your solution?

Laprée: Per Angusta can be used as a stand-alone platform. Every active user accesses Per Angusta by logging in from any device that has internet access. As a collaborative tool, Per Angusta was created to break down silos and enable communication between procurement and other departments. To help dismantle those barriers, the platform is also accessible to contributors (with read-only access), including finance, legal, and control cost management to encourage frequent interactions with stakeholders. As an open platform, Per Angusta can connect effortlessly with companies’ existing systems and processes, offering complementary features to effectively support procurement in their digital journey. Thanks to integrations with data providers and software solutions, such as SAP Ariba, we are able to operate concurrently to bring more value to our customers. Project rollout is seamless, with our dedicated customer success team supporting customers in every step of the implementation. Typically, integration only takes a few days or weeks to be up and running, depending on client needs and existing processes. Our clients furthermore appreciate that Per Angusta was made by procurement practitioners.

Why did you start Per Angusta?

Laprée: For nearly three decades, sales teams have had CRM tools to build and track their pipeline, monitor their sales target, manage their team, and report on their progress. Despite the progression of procurement digitalization, most solutions are still dedicated software tools that focus solely on transactional processes. Before starting Per Angusta, I was a procurement director for a Fortune 500 company. I created my own company because I realized that most procurement organizations, despite their maturity or size, were using Excel to manage their negotiation activities and measure their performance. And even though I had fancy technologies to place purchase orders and run tenders, I had no collaborative tool to efficiently manage my team and their activity or even demonstrate to top management how we were contributing to the organization.

How could your solution potentially help customers navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and the different challenges of reopening?

Laprée: Procurement teams have played a major role during the pandemic, finding new savings opportunities and diversifying sources of supply, all without adopting bad “cost killer” habits. This is where a procurement performance management approach can help procurement get organized – not only internally, but also with stakeholders and finance departments. Per Angusta helps buying teams to prioritize opportunities, set savings targets, and track progress to ensure there is constant monitoring of critical actions and that projects are executed successfully and on time. This agile approach also helps to quickly evaluate and reprioritize when needed. Per Angusta provides the required metrics to paint an accurate picture of procurement performance for CFOs with savings reports that can be used to track expense reduction. Per Angusta also favors collaboration at a time where distance is making teamwork less easy and systematic.

How are you connected to SAP?

Laprée: Per Angusta is a valuable complement to SAP procurement solutions. End users can move back and forth seamlessly, launching an open tender directly from their project, enabling informed negotiations and monitoring their performance all in one place. Thanks to the integration with Per Angusta, procurement organizations who run SAP Ariba are now able to track project progress and view savings in real time. Furthermore, Per Angusta will soon be directly available in the SAP Store.

How has SAP.io’s involvement impacted your journey?

Laprée: Far from being a heavy transformation program, SAP.io has revealed how Per Angusta can play a significant role in the SAP ecosystem. Bringing dynamism and agility, along with benefits like our quick deployment or our expertise in procurement, we are able to reinforce our respective value offers. This provides multiple opportunities for Per Angusta to diversify and accelerate its development through SAP’s existing network, opening our services to new market segments and geographies.

What’s next for Per Angusta?

Laprée: Our company is developing both in terms of business and international presence, but also in terms of expertise and human resources. Per Angusta has a team of over 30 people, and we plan to hire 20 more by the end of 2021 to ensure local project management, comprehensive customer support, and growing our existing customer base in Europe and North America. Our roadmap focuses on increasing the functional depth of our solution and expanding the ecosystem through our AppExchange (catalog of standard integrations), favoring key integrations like the one with SAP Ariba.

Thank you for the interview.

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