Rich Sains is the Founder and CEO of Acada. With over 20 years procurement experience and a significant portion of this focused on technology and IT, you could classify Rich as a procurement leader and digital enthusiast. With a desire to help procurement reach its potential as a strategic business function, Rich provides a small snapshot of Acada.
Hi Rich, who are Acada?
Acada is a Digital Procurement consultancy and solutions provider. We advise on digital procurement strategy, and we have developed a Productivity Suite for Procurement to better manage activity, pipeline and intake – ActivityHub.
What issues do your solutions solve?
Many Procurement teams are drowning in tactical and admin work, struggling to find time to focus on the strategic activity that matters most to their business. They are reactive and have unforecasted peaks in workload.
We help teams to have a clear view of their pipeline to prioritise their effort, remove tactical work through self-service, and provide performance insights to demonstrate their value to the c-suite.
Who is your solution aimed at?
We sell to CFOs, CPOs, Tech Procurement leaders and Procurement Excellence leaders. Size of business from £200m – £5bn turnover in the Tech, retail, finance sectors.
What is the biggest challenge Acada faces?
The general lack of investment in Procurement technology – there is a culture of making do and surviving on the lowest cost of function. We show teams that effective digitisation can be affordable and provide a good ROI – as long as buzzwords and fads are avoided and there is a real focus on people, process and data rather than just the technology.
Why pick Acada?
We are obsessed with great user experience – making tech easy to use. We spend a lot of time on design and focus on the smallest details to ensure that there is no wasted effort. We integrate with other data sources so there is no duplication of input. The tech should do the heavy lifting – not the user.