As you can imagine the simple things at times are the toughest. Naming the platform was one of those tasks. After brainstorming and coming up with hundreds of ideas a decision was made on Sourcing Shark. The reason being we had a like product already developed called Data Shark supporting Technology Insights.
Before Sourcing Insights was created, the technology was a suite of Technology Insights, Karl Andersson’s first company he started in 1997. After seeing the power of the tool with a large corporation in 2008, he decided it would make more sense to break it out as a separate entity.
At Technology Insights, his infrastructure was more focused on selling to large billion-dollar companies and dealing with IT security centered around accounts payable and identifying duplicate invoices. After working in that space, Karl noticed that Purchasing and Accounts Payable don’t necessarily work directly together. It just was not possible to sell Accounts payable work and supply chain at the same time.
Karl has become extremely successful in this space having clients like Coors Brewing, Puma, Adidas, and United Airlines. But one thing he learned is that companies are always focused on analyzing the transactions, how many invoices they are processing, purchase orders, and what’s the cost to process an invoice or PO, how many line items. High-level strategic thinking doesn’t always happen as much as you would think to step back and really take a look at the bigger picture.
The Sourcing Shark platform needed to be geared towards smaller companies because, at the time, it was designed for companies over a billion dollars in revenue. Karl is a firm believer that there is a high demand for a service like Sourcing Insights with a smaller organization, especially inside their procurement department.
This is where having the Sourcing Shark platform creates the blueprint to begin strategically thinking to build a strategy, focus on commodity plans and decide as an organization how to do this with the company’s vision and growth plans. You can really begin to track your progress. One of our motto’s is our company was built by supply chain professionals, for supply chain professionals.
From 2017 to 2020 our software has continued to grow. We have added features such as contract management, pricing variance compliance, savings tracking, part pricing, max and min and contract compliance.
Looking forward, our biggest focus is to begin offering the contract compliance function as a stand-alone product as well as develop a mobile application.
