Market Dojo in Seventh Heaven

What do Market Dojo and these photos of celebrities have in common?

Extra prizes if you can all guess who they are – we’ll tell you at the end.
The answer is that they are all 7 years old at this snapshot in time.  And so earlier this month we quietly surpassed this milestone as well, although we can only aspire to achieve the same global acclaim!

Even in this short time, it’s astounding to witness how quickly technology has moved along on the one hand, yet on the other, it’s equally astounding how slowly it has propagated through the Procurement function where we are still discovering FTSE 250 companies with no eProcurement policy in place.

It reminds me of a previous article we wrote about what life would look like if we all still used all tech from the year 2000 (& not just procurement tech).  Find it here.

Anyhow, here’s a reflection of some of the main highlights of the past 12 months:

New Clients

The past 12 months has brought us some fantastic accounts with some pretty unique challenges, from global roll-outs intended to modernise the entire Procurement function – hear more about that at eWorld this September – through to a series of eAuctions run in the course of a few weeks that resulted in savings of $50m!

Recruitment

It has been another busy year on the recruitment front.  In September we welcomed James to join our Development team, closely followed by Henry in November within Business Development.  We’re also due to welcome Angie in September to join our Marketing team, plus have a couple of available opportunities in Business Development with plenty more to come.

We’re delighted to be able to offer our current Business Development Manager, Lewis, a change in his career path to build up our Customer Success team.  As a small firm, it’s genuinely exciting to be able to offer the team the ability to progress as they see fit.

Product Roadmap
Our customers have been hugely supportive in helping us to improve Market Dojo and allowed us to build many new features. We’ve had another hugely productive year but some of our favourites moments are:

• A complete revamp of the user interface to make the most of modern user experience best practice.
• A streamlined process for awarding business to suppliers to close the loop on what was actually delivered back to the business from sourcing activities.
• An API and integration with third parties so our best-of-breed tools can be embedded into a full eProcurement suite or even to non-procurement tools such as CRMs.
• Multiple approval steps in our onboarding tool so clients can bespoke the workflow across the entire business for approving new suppliers.
• Questionnaire and Lot templates so procurement teams can consistently benefit from your single versions of the truth.
• Detailed participant activity tracking to shed more light on where participants are getting stuck in the sourcing process.

Growth
This year we worked out that we’ve saved our clients over £1.3bn across 25,000 eSourcing events, at an average of 16% saving!  Quite astonishing really.

Inaugural conference
One of the genuine highlights of the year was our debut annual conference held in April at the historic Stonehouse Court Hotel.  The event was a great success with over 100 attendees on the day to listen to insightful talks from speakers including Robert Copeland, UK Procurement Director at G4S; Rob Lees, Commercial Director at the MoD; and Simon Boggis, former CPO at CEVA Logistics.

What will the next 12 months bring?
We’ll continue with our recruitment plans as well as push our brand further overseas to build on the success we’ve already seen to once again bolster our revenues by 50%.  We hope to be doing more with you all in the coming months!
PS:  The photos were of:  Prince William, Beyoncé, Madonna and Robert de Niro.  Well done if you got them all.

Market Dojo helps procurement professionals negotiate better with our on-demand eSourcing tools. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch or register for free and play around with our software for yourself!