Read the Full Article Here
Internal forces are pushing CIOs to collaborate with vendors and suppliers strategically and from a data-driven perspective. External forces are pushing CIOs to play a bigger innovation role to keep pace with demanding macro conditions and competitive pressures. Enterprises that partner more effectively with strategic vendors and suppliers are better positioned to meet both challenges. Terzo enables stronger relationships and increased alignment both internally and externally. By transforming vendors and suppliers into partners, Terzo helps CIOs drive business results.
Before founding Terzo, Brandon Card spent his career at large enterprise technology companies, most recently Microsoft. He worked in leadership roles in cloud portfolio management and sales. During his career, Card interacted with Fortune 500 CIOs and other functional business leaders who focused on new cloud technologies and cloud migration for digital transformation. Card experienced first-hand the many challenges CIOs faced managing third-party vendor ecosystems. “I observed the CIO role becoming more challenging, as more was being asked of these leaders in the ‘technology first’ world we operate in today. As more business value shifts towards ‘tech enabled’ business strategies, CIOs were relying on strategic vendors more and more. This necessitates a shift in the relationship and magnifies the importance of strategic vendors,” explains Card. As a result of the pressures CIOs faced, Card was repeatedly provided by customers to ‘create a CRM, but for the buyer.’
Brandon Card, Founder & CEO, Al Giocondi, Co-Founder & Head of Sales
Determined to change things for the better, Card teamed with long-time friend, Al Giocondi, who had similar experiences during his years in sales at IBM and Oracle. The duo leveraged top CRM tools to manage their customers but realized their customers had no platform for the other side of the ‘handshake’ - to manage the vendors. Subsequently, Card reached out to another friend, Pradeep Thangavel, who was a top principal engineer at Freshworks. The three came together to found Terzo in March 2020 and bring the Vendor Relationship Management (“VRM”) concept to market. Through the firm’s VRM, enterprises gain insights that allow them to drive innovation, improve governance, increase collaboration, and optimize performance. “We’ve been able to move quickly, because our three co-founders strongly empathize with the customer problem and bring the right technical skills to build the right solution,” adds Card.
Strengthening Relationships
With the Terzo platform, organizations can improve their vendor relationships and optimize joint outcomes, including responding to global challenges. The core functionality of the Terzo platform is its ability to centralize siloed data. Today, vendor data is managed in general purpose tools like spreadsheets and email. Valuable adjacent data is distributed across different platforms and tools such as the ERP, P2P, IT Ops, risk management systems, and more. The existing approach —spreadsheets, emails, and point solutions—leave users wanting more fluidity of process and comprehension of purpose. Terzo is unique because it’s built like a CRM; it contextualizes enterprise data together with people to generate actionable insights.
“Terzo aggregates data in the platform creating a true vendor hub. This organized, structured data allows customers to have visibility and develop insights to make faster and smarter decisions,” explains Card. This rich contextualization creates a bias toward action that can accelerate business results. Enterprises outperform when they combine the power of their data with their people, including increasing data-driven collaboration and decision making.
What’s more?
The platform profoundly connects people from different departments on complex, multi-stage processes like procurement and engages them beyond procurement in a holistic vendor management lifecycle. “While data is critical, people still drive performance at large enterprises, so we embrace the mission to improve people-performance. Ultimately, we see this as an internal opportunity but eventually extending across company boundaries to ensure that suppliers, vendors, and customers are all collaborating together throughout the full lifecycle,” asserts Card.
Terzo is tailored to the CIO the same way CRMs are tailored to the CRO. This enables a new level of collaboration and accountability with internal and external stakeholders. Collaboration is proven to increase innovation and speed-to-value. Further highlighting this aspect, Card explains that Terzo is currently working with a Fortune 100 company to integrate their SAP ERP data into the Terzo platform to gain real-time contracts committed to actual spend comparisons for the first time. They are also bringing in apps like DocuSign for seamless integration of procurement workflows and contract execution. This delivers a more complete digital transformation, offering customers process visibility for demand management and prioritization. These digital transformations are reducing procurement cycle times by 50-80 percent.
Delivering Digital Transformation
“The difference with Terzo is, we bring in all the key stakeholders—internally and externally—connecting them to the critical processes and data. Our customers have their teams and data highly integrated to process, which helps them to make smarter decisions faster,” points out Card. The platform includes ‘no-code’ workflows to the line, complete with the ability to customize workflows, save default flows and reuse, review or audit work. The workflows have easy builtins like approvals and tasks, making the configuration possibilities suitable for simple tasks or complex projects. “A lot of our design is geared to increase productivity and visibility for the distributed workforce and the remote workforce of today,” explains Roger Laforce, Terzo’s CTO.
