Best-of Suite vs Best-of-Breed – which suits you best? Maybe it’s Suite Plus – a combination of both.

The “Best of Breed” vs. “Best of Suite” debate is a long-standing conversation in enterprise IT and procurement software selection. Each approach to choosing technology solutions has distinct advantages and trade-offs. However, especially for those organizations that have implemented a procurement suite solution in the past few years, there is a third option – Suite Plus, a hybrid approach where you benefit from the best of both worlds, enabled by orchestration.

So which is best? In reality, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. The real debate isn’t about which is inherently better, but which is better for you — and when. The most appropriate choice depends on your starting point, business goals, complexity, existing infrastructure, and resources.

Current Landscape

If you have invested in a Suite or a number of Best-of-Breed solutions but are looking to enhance capability, then it may be prudent to leverage your investment and add point solutions in critical pain point areas that need specialization.

Business Complexity

How diverse are the needs across departments in your organization? Do you have standardized business processes that don’t need to be updated on a regular basis or do you need flexibility and agility to flex as the business evolves?

IT Capability

Do you have a strong internal IT capability or a partner that can manage the various integrations required and ongoing optimization of a multi-platform environment or is a more simplified IT footprint with native integration more preferable?

Suite Plus – Extend the functionality and capability of your Suite solution with Best-of-Breed innovation

Recently, a growing trend among existing Suite users, recognizing the fact that not all modules offer the same depth of functionality and may be less robust or lack specialized features, is introducing best-of-breed solutions to enhance both functionality and capability across their procurement processes; thus, adopting a Suite Plus approach.

By doing so, rather than undertaking a full ‘rip and replace’, they are protecting their initial investment in their core source-to-pay suite whilst still addressing capability gaps in critical areas for the business. This is a much more cost-effective option and also minimizes the impact on internal resources. The Suite Plus approach can also be delivered in a phased agile approach, allowing value to be realized much quicker across the business.

 

How Best-of-Breed is driving innovation across the procurement process

Our procurement Best-of-Breed solution eco-system

One of the biggest challenge for procurement leaders is to keep track of all the best-of-breed solutions out there. At excelerated, we have reviewed the solution landscape and have identified a core number of technology partners we work with that are leaders in their specialized fields. Working closely with these partners, we have been able to developed accelerated implementation frameworks to integrate them through our bespoke ready-made connectors.

Orchestrate Harmony Across Your Procurement Process

When working with a multi-platform environment, the main practical challenges typically comes down to 2 key elements: integration and user experience. Recognizing the need to streamline fragmented processes and systems, the concept of procurement orchestration has emerged, offering a path to unify disparate systems into a cohesive, intelligent, and efficiently managed workflow.

Procurement intake and orchestration enables companies to centrally co-ordinate all of the purchase requests, workflows, information, and people involved in the procurement process across all related systems. It brings your static business process and procurement policy documentation to life by integrating it directly into the applications your employees use, allowing procurement teams to coordinate or “orchestrate” processes across applications and people.

Find out more about Procurement Intake
Find out more about Procurement Orchestration

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