Nicolas Neubauer is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of ivoflow. Prior to founding ivoflow, he and his Co-Founder Daniel Demuth worked in global strategic procurement for one of the largest automotive suppliers globally. At ivoflow, Nicolas is responsible for Business Development and Product Innovation.
So over to Nicolas to tell us more.
Nicolas what is ivoflow?
ivoflow provides innovative solutions to empower the strategic procurement function in global manufacturing companies. The platform offers complete transparency, identifies new cost-down opportunities, and maintains insights into constantly changing markets.
What issue does your solution solve?
Living in a world of big data, strategic procurement is getting more complex, resources are getting less and the “low-hanging-fruits“ are gone. Procurement teams are spending a significant amount of time on data preparation, visualizations or crunching numbers. There is not much time left to work on strategies or to negotiate effectively with suppliers. The amount of data procurement professionals need to process to excel in their role is almost impossible to achieve.
As we’ve been in this position ourselves, we have built an intuitive Procurement Management System that combines internal procurement data and external market intelligence. We created a lean and intuitive software product that can be tailored to each company, that empowers each purchasing professional and supports each user to manage their strategic spend more effectively and more efficiently than ever before.
Leveraging AI and smart algorithms, ivoflow visualizes all data from your ERP systems and combines it with external market data to automatically identify new cost savings potentials and supports customers to manage their procurement and cost-down projects collaboratively. Companies using ivoflow can identify opportunities to save costs, prevent price increases, recover from inflation, enhance supplier resilience, formulate category strategies, and prepare for smart negotiations.
Who is your solution aimed at? What does your perfect client look like?
Our solution is tailored for global manufacturing companies with annual sales of at least 500M€ Euro. These companies typically have a 50% BOM-to-sales ratio and operate with low-profit margins, making procurement critically important. Our ideal client’s procurement department faces challenges due to a diverse category and global supplier portfolio, as well as intangible market dynamics. These factors necessitate a significant hands-on strategy and a strong focus on cost reduction.
What is the biggest challenge ivoflow faces?
Our biggest challenge is becoming visible in our target market and clearly communicating how we differentiate ourselves from other market participants.
Companies we speak with are often looking for a pure spend analytics or procurement intelligence solution. However, we offer much more than that by not only mapping the data but also providing actionable recommendations on specific measures to realize the identified potentials.
Why pick ivoflow?
Compared to many of our competitors, we go beyond data visualization and enrich the internal data with external market data, tracking and managing actionable cost saving initiatives for direct spend categories. What is more, we understand the problems and pain points of procurement organizations through our own extensive global automotive procurement experience.