Port is transforming procurement. The advanced technology company has rapidly become the fastest growing provider of SaaS procurement, contract, and supplier management products across Australia and New Zealand.
Head of Growth and Spend Management at Port, Mark Reddy, explained the company's core offerings and how the procurement sector is evolving across the APAC region. "Port is now part of Advanced, the second largest provider of software and services in the UK," he said. "We were acquired just over twelve months ago. Our product toolkit sits under what we call spend management technology and covers the whole procurement life cycle."
These tools are targeted at large government and enterprise clients, helping them manage procurement planning activities. Reddy explained: "From someone in a business needing to buy fifty thousand of these, to someone running a large capital works engagement, our products help with everything - what do I need, why do I need it, who are the suppliers that can serve that for me – and runs the whole way through the sourcing process."
Automation plays a central role in the suite. "We automate the request-for-quote process, the request-for-proposal process, and conduct both closed and open tenders, public and private," he added. "The goal is to get to the stage of awarding a contract to a vendor as efficiently as possible."
Once a contract is awarded, Port provides contract management tools. "What we're doing is helping businesses digitise the way they request, approve, and manage contracts - and supporting everything through to digital e-signatures, which is vital in our increasingly remote working world," Reddy said. Port's solutions remove the need for printing and streamline the contracting process from start to finish.
Supplier management is another key area. Port's Supplier Lifecycle Management platform is designed to help businesses engage more effectively with their suppliers. "It manages administrative tasks like capturing the right assessment criteria from a supplier - are they cyber secure, do we have the right insurances and certificates - and tracks important requirements like ESG conformance and performance to SLAs," he explained.
Reddy is candid about the nature of the work. "It's back of house stuff - it's not sexy but it's really important for the procurement life cycle."
Innovation is central to Port's success. When asked about the most recent advancements, Reddy pointed to the company's focus on supplier collaboration. "Procurement technology has been around for some time. When we started in 2015, there were around forty e-procurement solutions. Now, there are over six hundred," he said. "The biggest thing we're pushing into is the supplier collaboration space."
The feedback from chief procurement and chief financial officers is clear: better collaboration with suppliers is now the top priority. "Gartner, Forrester, Hackett - all the major research houses show that CPOs and CFOs want to improve collaboration with suppliers," Reddy said.
Port has responded with a new Supplier Collaboration Hub. "It makes it effortless and an experience for the supplier to come in and engage with the different customers they do business with," Reddy said. "It's about removing friction points and making it easy for suppliers to find work, discover opportunities, and be asked a question once and share that across the businesses they work with."
Looking ahead, Port's development teams are laser-focused on further reducing friction in the procurement experience. "Internally, we talk a lot about procurement customer experience," Reddy said. "Procurement touches more customer groups and interfaces with more of a business than almost any other function."
He explained that Port's product teams are focused on mapping all the different user journeys and automating the places where friction still exists. "A lot of it is around generative AI capabilities and removing friction for any manual task," he said. The intention is to "serve up data based on historic and community insights at every decision point."
Another trend shaping Port's future is the use of generative AI, including tools inspired by recent advances like ChatGPT. "In their personal and business lives, people are used to jumping into Google, doing their research, and informing themselves quickly," Reddy said. He wants to bring that same sense of immediacy and ease into procurement, especially for occasional buyers and non-procurement specialists.
Port's geographical presence reflects its ambitions. "We're an Australian business. We operate across Australia and New Zealand with our head office in Sydney, and a new regional office in Newcastle, NSW," Reddy said. "Our Advanced colleagues since acquisition have a large office in Melbourne and we also have offices in Wellington and Auckland." In total, the company's local team numbers about forty-five staff.
Having local offices and operating in the correct time zones is seen as vital. "What's really important to us is being Australia and New Zealand's answer to enterprise-grade procurement solutions," Reddy said.
When it comes to engaging with Port, Reddy emphasised the human approach that sits behind the cutting-edge technology. "We're a technology company, a software company, but we're a people business first and foremost," he said. "We're very visible on LinkedIn and social networks. A point of pride for us is making sure we're out in the community, stimulating the community."
He described the company's efforts to maintain an open digital presence, with content and software demonstrations readily available to procurement professionals who want to educate themselves before engaging directly. "If a procurement professional is not already connected with one of us, I'd be surprised," he said.
Looking to the future, Reddy was optimistic about both Port's offering and the procurement sector as a whole. "We really pride ourselves on making that digital space a place where you can go and educate yourself, understand the problems the profession's facing, and engage with our content and software demonstrations before you pick up the phone and speak to one of our people," he said.
