Mercanis CEO & Co-Founder Fabian Heinrich offers the detail on the magic that has seen Mercanis quickly establish itself as one of the leading sourcing suites.
Fabian, what is Mercanis?
Mercanis is a holistic source-to-contract solution that helps both SMEs and corporations to optimize the purchasing process via sourcing, SRM, contract and spend management as well as compliance and risk management – and to achieve cost savings in prices and processes. We ensure that supplier knowledge is available throughout the company on a single platform and that purchasing teams find the best price and quality in the supplier network with a digital end-to-end process.
What issue does your solution solve?
Mercanis includes modules for the areas: sourcing, SRM, Contract Management and Compliance & Risk Management. Some key problems that are solved across these modules are the following.
Saving bottom line costs through improved procurement processes across the S2C cycle and by creating a single source of truth to increase transparency and data driven decision making: Mercanis creates 360° profiles for existing and new suppliers that contain information about capabilities, risks, prices, past sourcing events, certificates etc. With this transparent overview, purchasing teams can identify correlations in their supplier portfolio and design all sourcing and supplier activities strategically instead of transactionally. Buyers can find suitable suppliers with one click, invite more suppliers to start competitive price comparisons and, thanks to the transparent overview of suppliers, also bundle suppliers to achieve better conditions. Mercanis is designed so intuitively that even stakeholders from non-procurement teams can make purchases independently following the buying journey created by the purchasing team. All knowledge remains transparent at a single point of truth and the improved processes and transparency allow purchasers to realize significant savings in product and service costs.
Digitalizing, automating (incl. AI), centralizing and enabling collaboration to save process costs: Mercanis allows to save lots of manual work by digitalizing and automating processes across all areas from Sourcing, SRM, Contract Management to Compliance & Risk Management. This includes using Generative AI for processes like supplier selection and contract analysis. Mercanis can also be used as the single source of truth for information, central platform for communicating with suppliers and allows to have stakeholders from other departments source independently while complying with necessary standards. All of this saves time for procurement teams enabling them to focus more on strategic tasks to become true value drivers and strategic partners for their organizations.
Setting up a professional Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) to strengthen supplier partnerships and innovation: Many companies have the goal to improve their SRM but have a hard time to streamline the necessary processes. Mercanis allows to digitalize and configure the components of successful SRM on a central platform – from onboarding, to qualification, cross team ratings, information and document management, risk management etc. – to identify the best suppliers, build long term relationships and innovate together. Due to the highly intuitive user interface Mercanis also has a high acceptance or usage rate among buyers as well as suppliers.
Ensure compliance with supply chain regulation and reduce risks: With Mercanis, users can manage supplier compliance and risk through the 360° supplier profiles, third party integrations with risk information providers and configurable assessments to include custom criteria and weightings.
Who is your solution aimed at?
Mercanis is a solution for CPOs and procurement teams but allows stakeholders from other departments to collaborate with procurement teams on the platform. It can be used globally, by different company types from SMBs to corporations and across different industries from manufacturing, to engineering, services, retail, travel, energy, and health etc.
What is the biggest challenge Mercanis faces?
The main focus for Mercanis in recent years has been to work with our customers to define together where we can deliver the greatest added value with our solution. We have used the feedback from our users to continuously improve the product and develop it into a leading solution.
Why pick Mercanis?
Mercanis is a powerful all-in-one solution for the source-to-contract area (Sourcing, SRM, Contract Management and Compliance & Risk Management) that leverages Generative AI. Some of the things in particular that make Mercanis stand out from the competition are its easy-to-use UI and fast implementation for customers. Many existing solutions are overly complicated and are therefore poorly adopted amongst employees and suppliers. Mercanis is designed to be intuitive and enjoyable to use so that it is accepted and used frequently by purchasers and suppliers. In addition, many solutions take months to years to be implemented. Mercanis can be implemented in just 2 weeks to 2 months without needing IT support for implementation or configuration, which helps organizations realize their return on investment quickly.