Procurement and sourcing professionals who are researching advanced new procurement software often find two names that come up repeatedly: Arkestro and Fairmarkit. The two solutions aren’t necessarily in direct competition. In fact, there are even scenarios where some organizations might want to use both solutions for different aspects of their business. For example, Arkestro for sourcing and supply chain management and Fairmarkit for tail spend automation.
Is your procurement team confused about which software they should pick and what the differences are between Arkestro and Fairmarkit? In this post, we’ll look at the key features of the two procurement solutions and how they compare.
Let’s start by letting the two solutions speak for themselves, with a high-level overview of the key system features as described by the respective product overviews.
Fairmarket describes its value proposition as a platform that does the “heavy lifting” to get more bids with less manual effort, freeing up buyers to do more strategic work while securing stakeholder buy-in.
Arkestro’s value proposition is that it is the only predictive procurement software that helps procurement teams continuously exceed targets, delivering 2-5x more savings.
While Fairmarkit does offer some RFx capability, the area the platform really excels at is tail spend automation. The focus here is on having a group of regular suppliers offer pricing upfront for the low-value tail spend items that are always generated as part of a purchase request. Having the prices agreed to upfront allows Fairmarkit to make tail spend awards almost instantaneously.
Arkestro’s strengths are in its breadth of coverage of the procurement process, its AI-powered predictive capabilities (and associated features like Intelligent First Offers), and its flexibility. Arkestro’s capabilities span the full RFx process, including supplier management and purchase requests. The software supports users with advanced functions like forecast outcomes and a KPI dashboard. When it comes to tail spend support, Arkestro supports all categories, including MRO sourcing—which is a big part of tail spending. Arkestro has also been designed to seamlessly integrate with the most popular on-premise and cloud-based ERP and Procure-to-Pay systems.
Beyond the features that Arkestro offers, it also has strengths in its ability to unify the data from both big and small transactions. It offers unification across different categories of supplier management, contract management, and sourcing. This approach means that everything related to sourcing and the supply chain can be accessed and managed from a single platform.
Whether you landed here specifically to learn more about Arkestro or you were researching the features of Fairmarkit, we’d encourage you to go a step further. You’ve read about the features of Arkestro and how they compare to some of Fairmarkit’s capabilities. Reading is one thing, but experiencing Arkestro and its capabilities first-hand is another.
Book a free demo of Arkestro and learn how AI-powered predictive procurement changes the game, including process automation, spend analytics, and its handling of MRO sourcing. We’re confident Arkestro will make an impression as the procurement solution that will transform how your team does sourcing.