Eved: Getting Event Spend Under Control — Year-End Tech Review
Eved, which provides what amounts to a highly specialized source-to-pay (S2P) — with an emphasis on “pay” — suite, is bringing a closed loop supply management approach to events and conference spend in a manner that has not been done before.
Quick Facts
•Founded: 2010
•Headquartered in Chicago, with European office based in Brașov, Romania
•Number of employees: 62
•Serves customers in North America
•Industries responsible for the majority of their business: Tech, Pharma, Financial
•Customers include: Fortune 500 companies, including Dell and Eli Lilly and Company, and the world’s leading event companies, such as BCD
Background & Overview
Eved, which describes itself as an event commerce company, was started to fill one of the holes in big organization spend management: event spend management. In most Global 2000 organizations, even those that have dedicated e-procurement, T&E and event management solutions, conference/event remains a multi-million dollar black hole, often on a per event basis.
Such an approach leaves significant savings and value creation opportunity on the table. Without effective event expense and expenditure management, companies are missing out on opportunities to impact millions of dollars of meetings and event spend because of disparate, disconnected systems and manual processes. This results in missed sourcing opportunities, extreme workflow inefficiencies, compliance risk and budget overage and spend leakage.
However, with Eved’s platform, an organization’s sourcing platform can integrate with a specialized, fractal and line-level PO management capability, which then provides fine-grained spend visibility into all event spend, supplier and related data. This in turn allows organizations to manage and pay invoices, using their own accounts payables (A/P) systems, on a more granular basis and receive back an amalgamated, detailed, line-item invoice upon completion of an activity.
The solution includes the general stages and components of a source-to-pay platform but with customized modules and individual features to support the event lifecycle. (Also, the platform is “sold” together — companies have not decoupled individual modules or areas as a general rule).
One customization for event spend is that instead of a broad-based spend analytics module at the end of the “upstream” side of the suite, Eved includes the ability to create and manage a specific event. The solution does not, outside of pre-configured reports, provide a broad-based dashboard and analytics environment that offers flexible reporting or the ability to classify and associate data from outside the Eved system in a simplified manner.
Substitutes/competitors include:
•CoupaView Almanac Listing
•AribaView Almanac Listing/Concur
•Cvent
•EventPro
•Grenadine
Commentary & Summary
Our summary analysis of Eved suggests:
•Eved is the first solution that Spend Matters has seen that is focused on the spend management of a specific “context” within a business, in this case “business events”.
•In essence, Eved serves as a tool to manage what we might term, in non-technical language, a “super category mashup.” Regardless, what is critical to understand is that Eved is not really just an application but more of an S2P platform and network along the line of TradeshiftView Almanac Listing.
•Finally, having lived through recessions before in procurement and as procurement consultants and advisors, we would be negligent in noting that Eved provides the only toolset we have seen to not toss the event baby out with the proverbial bath water when budgets for this category of spend become tighter. Which, inevitably, during the next recession, they will.