How Acada is improving Procurement productivity with Rich Sains

Rich Sains is the Founder of Acada, a Procurement Tech company that looks to remove the mundane admin based work and gives real time insights as to what teams are working on. The awesome part about this solution is that it doesn’t require loads of “admin” to input the data. It gives a central view to Procurement Leaders as to what their team is working on.

We like that a lot.

Whilst talking, Rich started to go into detail around the design principles they follow at Acada. I was blown away by the attention to detail in the user experience. I’m sure all of you reading this right now have encountered a Procurement tool that promises the world but when you use it, it looks awful. There is nothing worse that a piece of software that is clunky and is stuck in the 90s.

With everything being tracked, it gives you insights into how much time is required to complete tasks. This could be an RFP exercise, a contract review or consolidation of your supply chain. This in invaluable data as a procurement leader and let’s you utilise your available resource in the best way possible.

If we want to get even nerdier here, this is great for any audits that you may have that look into your organisational control measures such as ISO or SOC2.

In this episode we talk about Acada, why Rich started it and when we met a while back in London for a drink.

You can connect with Rich here on Linkedin.

Transcript:

00:00
Daniel Barnes
Hey, Rich. Awesome. To awesome. To have you on the World of Procurement podcast. We  were just talking and we met what felt like a long time ago, and it was like we said, like, was it a few weeks ago? We met. 

00:14
Rich Sains
Two weeks ago back to London. Yeah. 

00:17
Daniel Barnes
We had a good session there from a whole bunch of us from procurement and people like yourselves tech leaders in the space. I kind of just want to continue the conversation here because those nights are so hectic. It was like, I don't know, 25 people, which doesn't sound like a lot, but within the procurement space, I think that's a miracle getting people together in a pub, right? Yeah, 

00:40
Rich Sains
Yeah. Yeah. And, and it was good to be back to, meeting people. A lot of these people were people that you've met on LinkedIn over the last 18 to 24 months and actually meeting people face to face everyone that's say tool, it was quite an incredible night. Yeah. It was really good to have Mathias over from Amsterdam as well. Yeah, it was good to get to meet lots of new people. 

01:01
Daniel Barnes
Yeah. He put us to shame with his superior height. He’s a giant among us. He made me, he made me feel very small, but yeah, it is really cool to have you on the podcast now. I think you're the first podcast guest I've had on here, who I've spoken to for a while. Who I’ve actually met in person before meeting virtually face-to-face. So it's a new experience for me. I just want to kind of pass over to you here for you to give a bit of an introduction to yourself, and then maybe just give a bit of an intro into the, your service, your software company, I should say. And I'm not going to name it. I'm going to let you name it cause I keep butchering their pronunciation as well. 

01:47
Rich Sains
Great. Yeah. So, hi, I'm Rich Sains and yeah, I've been in procurement for 20 years. I was Head of IT Procurement going back quite well. Now, now nearly 10 years. Yeah, spent a lot of time in retail, a lot of time in work on e-commerce procurement. And then I went freelance in 2014. I spent probably about five or six years working around a number of companies. I've worked with some really fantastic forward thinking procurement leaders and really got this I guess, shared vision as procurement, as a strategic business discipline. One of the things I've always found is it's really being held back by technology. I'm a a, I guess you could say a digital native someone who's grown up with lots of tech from a very early age, very interested in it and actually work in procurement. Just found that, especially early on had some very painful experiences working with, some of the early iterations of the suites that were out there. 

02:52
Rich Sains
I dunno, I just felt, over the last five years or so you've got teams that have given up. 

03:01
Daniel Barnes
Accurate, 

03:02
Rich Sains
Well, waving the white flag, you know? Yeah. Moving away from those systems, decommissioning them, they've invested a lot of money, a lot of time and effort and some of the teams I've seen that they're not even tracking the activity that they're working on or anything like that anymore, or if they are using a spreadsheet or something quite manual. I don't know, there's this dichotomy of you want procurement to become this really strategic business discipline, but how can it be if you don't even know what the, what your team's working on and, if it takes a week to create a dashboard so that you can tell you exact same about what's going on, that's like, yeah, that's really difficult. So, so a lot of similar challenges across all the clients that I was working with, and I guess I was waiting for something to come along and solve it. 

03:50
Rich Sains
Eventually I'm just like, no, I can't wait any longer. It's up to me. I need to, I need to and solve this challenge. So, so that was why I founded Acada in  2019. And yeah. I guess I used a lot of the experience I've built up from the e-commerce side. Things like great user experience, having a, an easy to use interface. That's like a really key thing. We probably, when we're building stuff out, we'll spend at least 50% of the time that the development time on the design iteration, the wireframing by making sure that the user interface is like spot on before we then go into development and really trying to, I guess, remove out any friction to reduce down the number of clicks that someone has to do in order to do an activity. So that's yeah. Where we got to creating Acada. 

04:41
Daniel Barnes
Now, that's awesome. What kind of surprised me is, I don't know how old you are. I'm not going to ask you. To look at you, you, you look fairly young, right? Head of IT Procurement 10 years ago. This seems insane to me that I was just thinking, actually, this is a, maybe a slightly left field question, but in terms of the development of software, do you do any of that yourself? Like, are you in any way coding? 

05:12
Rich Sains
I'm, I have an understanding of tech and I have coded, I guess when I was younger, I started off with a ZX spectrum in the bedroom and writing some very I guess, rudimentary lines of code, which may have put some basic image up on the screen. A bit later on when internet came along, I did learn HTML. I could still code up a basic website and a bit of sequel as well, back in the early days of this CRM. I, I know what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. For me, I get frustrated with the coding side of things. It's it's more of the debugging actually, that I struggle with. So, so I employ people to do the development and in, there's, well, people yeah, a lot younger than me that are like, literally just thinking, that's what you want. You want, you want to I need to be able to articulate the vision for the product, and then they still bring that to life. 

06:14
Rich Sains
That's really through the coding. 

06:16
Daniel Barnes
Yeah, no, that's really cool. I, I want touch on the user interface point, but I'm going to hold off. I just wanted to, maybe in terms of a deep dive, in terms of what Acada does, like, does it govern your entire procurement processes that a workflow task management system what's its core, what’s it trying to solve? 

06:42
Rich Sains
Okay. Yeah. I think as a, I guess, coming at it from a, as a procurement leader, so I guess I want to know what the team are working on, where are the bottlenecks, how can I better support them? What I want it to be able to do is to do that in a way that doesn't get in the way of the team's jobs. I don't want this to be an overhead. I want it to be something that's, the data is literally just there. So that the solution to that is to build a task workflow type system, which just makes the user's life easier. I think the mission is to make life easier for human people. It's taking whatever the 10 or the 15 things that you do very frequently. Can you make those 50% easier, a hundred percent easier if you can automate your stuff? 

07:35
Rich Sains
So, the software is developed is it guides the user through each step of the activity that they're working on. Not just a tender process, but negotiation, a contract, RFX, process review, whatever it is that they're doing. It suggests tools and templates along the way that allows them to do that job more easily. They can also record what they did you can and then you can record on that. You can report on,  how long it's taken to do something. So, if something's getting passed over to legal, does it take care of just get lost in a little a black hole there? Or is it coming back in a timely fashion? Yeah, that's really what we've done. There was a question about the pain points as well. 

08:23
Daniel Barnes
Makes sense. Right. In terms of firstly, I, I was just thinking like that is actually normally a gap, isn't it? And, and all of these systems that way we are presented, we might end up implementing a P2P or CLM or whatever, and it can become very disjointed in terms of where you get your data from and like the, how long things take and as, and not every single tool out there has a good workflow system in it that can capture data along the way. Actually, I was just thinking that's kind of cool because a lot of the tracking is focused on, getting to contract signature, but there's a lot of stuff that happens around that, or even after that, or, post contract as well. I, I was just thinking that does sound really. Yeah, just as a leader in this space, you're going to get a lot of good insights as to what your team's doing without having to, I guess, keep going on at them to tell you. 

09:20
Daniel Barnes
I was always, and this is a, this was a fleeting thought, like, this would almost be micromanagers a dream in some ways, but then I thought. It wouldn't because the micromanager just wants to be interfering at best. This is very hands off in that sense. I think it sounds awesome, but yeah, like pain points, for sure. Like pain points, solving those for procurement people, I'd be interested to get your view on like what you're seeing now. 

09:50
Rich Sains
Yeah. I think in terms of pain points, I mean, for a leader, it's, we want to have accurate real-time view about what was being worked on, being able to measure those KPIs that they've just not been able to measure until now, but then for user it's just to help them be more organized, spend less time on the tactical and the admin. I mean, I think, the trouble we've had previously, I think has been that the user, if they're being asked to report stuff, it's something that they've got to do on a Friday afternoon. There's a reminder goes in the calendar that says, please, can you update your report at this time? That I've got the view for a meeting that I've got on Monday or whatever, or they're running around and trying to find out stuff. So, so really want to remove that overhead with them. 

10:33
Rich Sains
Cause they should just be focused on the, on delivery on the most strategic things, the relationship building and all that. So, so yeah, I mean, along the way, it's really giving them everything they need and it's not like it's not just like templates is, it could be like, an email template or a punch out to assist them or bring in systems that the company might not have, but actually would be really useful to that individual to get their work done. For everything, everyone else, I guess the stakeholders and suppliers, but by reducing down the time it takes to run a process. Obviously that's just good for everyone.

11:13
Daniel Barnes
Yeah. I really liked that last point actually, because this sounds like a dream for procurement leaders, procurement teams automating any of the mundane and like that image that you just described are running around on a Friday afternoon. I think that's all too common. Still, sometimes it's like, well, where's the data source? Like where do we get this information? If you know exactly where everything is, you can pull data off of that. You're focused very much there on live or real-time data is so much more powerful. One thing we all often forget about as procurement people, as outside of that, we've got people in the business who are relying on us. If we don't do things in a speedy way, in an efficient way, actually deliver value. They're just going to think, what the hell, why do we need this team here? 

12:09
Daniel Barnes
Like they're not adding anything. I think that say, when I go around to different businesses that's always been one of the challenges. They've always had very bad experiences, with procurement over in past jobs or in the current business. If you can make a, a very good experience for them, you're going to get closer to winning them onside, but it takes a long time. Right. So I really liked the focus there. 

12:40
Rich Sains
Yeah. I mean, I, I've been listening to a lot of podcasts obviously, listen to your podcast and it's the precast. Actually the, having a lot of founders on these and listening to their, the origin stories, they I guess, one of three things they're either that they've come from the procurement technology ecosystems or the existing one they've come from, maybe some of those legacy providers and they're starting up something new because they've had that experience or their procurement people. They're obviously, there's a few definitely coming from procurement now who are, similar to me into the take you on that journey. You've also got, I've heard quite a few, who've maybe got like investment banking background, but then they get, they've had an experience with procurement and then they'd been so frustrated by it. They're like, God, this is a problem that desperately needs solving. Like let's get into the space. 

13:31
Rich Sains
So, so yeah, there are frustrated stakeholders that are coming in to try and solve. Some of these challenges are using procurement technology. 

13:40
Daniel Barnes
I think that's a really good insight. The podcast I just put out was with Paid, which is a, an, a, another automated solution and Natasha the co-founder, she was a legal professional. Actually it's funny because we often give a legal, a lot of stick, right. I'd like, I think you even used legal a good example as a time delay. She found the opposite in that procurement was the absolute road block to get anything done. It's really interesting to see all the backgrounds of all of like people like yourself and like, oh, how have I lived in procurement or have I got this outside perspective? Or I just think I can do better than the legacy. I think it's really accurate that they do seem to be the free types of founders. I found it really interesting, your point around you spend, and you can correct me if I've misquoted you here, but was it 50% of time at the outset working on just the way in which your software looks for users? 

14:47
Rich Sains
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. I think that's, yeah. I mean maybe in certain cases it might even be more, I think yeah. I'm definitely on the outside, it was around 50% of the time. It was, you have a specific UX UI lead. He, he takes that away, designs it and then, but then yeah, just reduces down friction as much as possible that, so, yeah, there's definitely pressure off. I've heard a few, there's definitely a few more people who are coming at it from that angle as well. Cause yeah, as I say, I think procurement technology up until this point, it's tried to be all things to all people and it's complex. It's not, it is a complex thing. You've got to wherever you can, it's about simplifying it. It's about getting the right level of, maybe 80% of the information for a hundred percent of people rather than trying to get so a hundred percent of information that may be any 10% of the people actually even need. 

15:49
Daniel Barnes
Yeah, I know. I actually think it's amazing that you're doing that because I look at a lot of solutions, many like for this podcast, right. I look to see core solutions and cool people like yourself to bring on. Some of the things I'm looking at, I just, they look awful still and I'm just like, Nope, the integrity. Like I'm going to ask them about stuff. I'm just going to think, from the outside looking in, I already don't like what you're doing. In my day job, and I don't really talk too much about that. So I just leave it at that. We just brought in a new CLM provider. 

16:36
Daniel Barnes
One of the things I was so adamant on was the user experience in general, like, how does the screen look to us? How will the screen look to our stakeholders and how will it look to our suppliers, that triangle there, because if it doesn't work for one of us, and we're saying we want to collaborate only through this platform. It needs to be amazing for all of us. It needs to be simple to use, and it needs to give us what we need with one or two clicks. If you're clicking five, six times to get to a data point, that's a massive concern. I think you're so right to be focusing on that, because like you say, if you look at, I can just recall using SAP based products. When I first got into procurement, when I was first in defence and the convoluted menus to get to anything, I couldn't even tell you which version and what kind of there seems to be so many different modules. 

17:36
Daniel Barnes
Right. And I think that's probably another thing. Like, I, I, maybe you can talk to a, I imagine your solution is just, that's what it is. It's just one solution that you can tailor to certain teams, or they can just implement, is it out of the box potentially as well? 

17:52
Rich Sains
Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a couple things, so I, yeah, I probably go back like 18, 19 years started off at, in a place that was an SAP shop. Actually, yeah, they, we used to go on these three-day training courses and I think pretty much it was literally, these are the menu options that you need to click in order to get to the thing that you want to do. And, or actually, I think there was a bit of a short thing where you could just type in the codes and you learn all the codes and then the right space. Yeah. In terms of user experience, I mean, there's more and more younger people coming into the profession, digital natives. I think, the technology that they're using in their day-to-day lives, it's just so seamless, so easy to use. If you give them something that's difficult to use in procurement in the day job, like with all the will in the world and all the, sanctions that you can put against them, actually, they're just not gonna use it. 

18:47
Rich Sains
They're gonna find a way around it. And, that's what I've always found is if something's painful to use, then people just don't use it. You struggle for adoption. So, for us, it's, we've got to make sure that what we're doing is aligned with processes because obviously it's talking the user through those processes. By doing that, we can I guess, challenge, is the process to lighten this area is it is a bit too heavy, so we can help to streamline that. Yeah, I think, one of the key things is that we just need to be making sure that we're focusing on there is that really, that really add value to the process and almost removing, automating stuff that is, is not necessary anymore. 

19:36
Daniel Barnes
I've come into this space, used to like being on my phone or hold my Mac, using apps, having a really seamless experience every single day. 

20:34
Daniel Barnes
I came into procurement and it was the worst possible experience. The maybe the first three or four years where I genuinely thought that I was going to leave the profession because I was looking at the sales teams, we have Salesforce and they like, they were having loads of fun. The tech just seems so much better. I thought that this is not fun for me to be doing. Do you think as a central now for the procurement teams to have good tech solutions in to bring new and younger people into the profession and keep them here? 

21:19
Rich Sains
Oh, definitely. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. I think, I think there's a real, and there's a real resource challenge in, well, industry, everyone talks about it in procurement and it is, experienced people in procurement are hard to come by. The issue you're going to have is you do have people talk, there's LinkedIn, people look at other professions and I have seen people move out of procurement completely and into other professions. If you've got great systems there and it makes the user's life easier, then actually they will just gravitate towards those professions. So, I mean, I guess that was one of the things that spurred me on was really, I think, a few years ago people were saying, look, is that there's a bit of a 2030 view of procurement. Is procurement still going to be around? Does it have the absolute right to be around? 

22:19
Rich Sains
Procurement could just become quite decentralized. It could go into supply chain, you could do other things. So, so we've really got to fight to keep it and show what the value is, because I think everyone is in procurement understands the value and they, and hope they love the profession. They want to see it do better. Yeah, that's a big thing for me is like, we need the right technology in order to do that. And that's why, yeah. Why, why start I started Acada.

22:45
Daniel Barnes
Just at this point, say like, where can people find you? I think LinkedIn is pretty going to be the best place. Is it for you personally? 

22:52
Rich Sains
Yeah. Either on LinkedIn or just email me directly at rich@acadatech.com.

23:01
Daniel Barnes
Where is the best place to go find out more outside of this podcast
23:10
Rich Sains
Yeah, yeah. So it's acadatech.com. 

23:16
Daniel Barnes
Well, I'll have all of that in the description below and in the full show notes over on worldofprocurement.co.uk , which would literally be a transcript of this full conversation that people can read through. Please do go check those out, but Rich, this has been awesome talking to you today. Really cool. Just to get that, like that initial insight into what Acada is up to. I think it sounds really cool. Yeah. It’s been an absolute pleasure. 

23:49
Rich Sains
Brilliant. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for your time.