Wielding the latest procurement technology at Anvil Analytical
Wielding the latest procurement technology at Anvil Analytical
Exclusive Q&A with Richard Brown, Head of Sales & Marketing at disruptive SaaS provider Anvil Analytical, on tackling the complex and recurring issues within strategic sourcing and supplier management.
nvil Analytical is a Software as a Service provider headquartered in London, UK. The company’s solutions are used by businesses large and small across all sectors and geographies to improve third-party spend management and to measure and mitigate their carbon footprint.
From its inception in 2021 Anvil has grown quickly, taking on new clients from California to Australia, and in 2024, it redoubled development efforts around the practical use of AI to maintain its position on the cutting edge of procurement technology.
Here to tell us more about the growth and success of Anvil Analytical is Richard Brown, Head of Sales & Marketing, in this exclusive Q&A.
What has the journey to date been like at Anvil Analytical?
Born out of a world of procurement consulting, Anvil’s technology has been widely used by practitioners prior to the company’s inception in 2021. Before spinning out of its sister company, the Anvil team were part of a fellow group company and procurement services firm, 4C Associates, where the tools were initially developed to ensure the consultants quickly gained visibility of a client’s spend and could as efficiently as possible drive the greatest bottomline impact.
Over the years, clients began to notice the technology being used by the consultancy teams and were keen to retain it on a licensed basis beyond the initial engagement. It became instantly clear to the group leadership that
this technology suite had great value beyond purely an in-house set of tools.
Fast forward to the current day and Anvil has progressed to being one of the procurement community’s favourite analytic tools with first-place user ratings on well-known sites such as Gartner.
The organisation’s set of offerings has also expanded dramatically to include five brand new products including the likes of Carbon Management, Risk Management and Market & Inflation Analytics. These product lineup enhancements have arisen from Anvil’s ability to both develop quickly and maximise the aspirations of a vibrant, client-led development community hungry for ever-greater innovation to drive value internally.
How has the rise of AI influenced Anvil Analytical’s offering?
During Anvil’s short history to date, we’ve seen AI burst onto the scene and become mainstream within the procurement community. However, in a procurement innovation world all too often dominated by box-ticking rhetoric, Anvil was keen from the offset to innovate AI solutions which were true to the tool’s humble beginnings: practical, easy to use and precise.
With this being the case, the development team were tasked to take a look at where AI could make the greatest practical impact on our tools and more importantly, the experience of its users. Three key areas were selected as initial areas of focus, spanning firstly large language model applications into the world of optical
character recognition (OCR), driving the tool’s capability to work through thousands of contracts, policies and supplier websites, addressing key needs within the worlds of risk management, contract management and invoice processing.
Secondly, data cleansing and categorisation are fundamental to the success of every Anvil Analytical deployment. Ultimately, the better quality of data fed into the solution, the better outcomes that follow. It’s then the very engine of the Anvil operation which the team have targeted with our second AI-driven development. Our technology utilises a range of strategies to categorise the spend initially, where we use machine learning which has evolved more recently to include large language model classifications as well. Within the world of directs, we’ve started to introduce neural networks to search for patterns in the data. In simple terms, these technologies help us land implementations faster and at a higher rate of accuracy.
Last, but certainly not least, for many months Anvil has been developing a supplier discovery tool. For sourcing teams, so often the holy grail of an initial sourcing process is driven by the volume of quality suppliers which can be entered into the mix. Thus, a solution which can utilise an AIpowered search into the world of available suppliers subdivided by geography and category/chosen taxonomy is a real game-changer. Wind forward to the current day and
“Anvil was keen from the offset to innovate AI solutions which were true to the tool’s humble beginnings: practical, easy to use and precise”
Richard Brown, Head of Sales & Marketing
the Anvil solution is now in the very final development stages, something which both the organisation and our clients are incredibly excited about.
Where else does the company support users beyond spend analytics?
Away from the world of more recent developments, perhaps one of Anvil’s most important innovations in its history to date has been our Carbon Management product.
It’s no secret that understanding scope 3 carbon emissions for many organisations is an unmitigated nightmare. For those newer to the subject, scope 3 emissions are most heavily made up of carbon emissions resulting from an organisation’s purchases and the emissions generated as result of manufacturing the products or delivering the services purchased. Traditional methods of
understanding this figure would involve organisations reaching out via large-scale questionnaires to its supply base, to gather information directly from them. Due to a number of reasons, however, this approach is rarely effective with so few companies able to accurately report on their own in-house emissions.
Anvil’s Carbon Management product then is placed as a ‘silver bullet’ allowing organisations to report on their scope 3 emissions enabled via a series of configurable dashboards and an accompanying Anvil-built Project Management tool to help manage carbon reduction initiatives. Anvil’s process of measuring emissions follows the Green House Gas (GHG) global protocol methodology and combines a range of both carbon and financial data to present the most accurate approximations available. As a starting point, Anvil will gather data from a client’s ERP (invoicing) system to piece together invoice line item spend against each service and product. This then kicks off a spend approximation piece of work, which
is then later enhanced by a range of additional methods including the use of quantity-based data.
The tool brings many benefits but beyond those brought about as result of the newfound visibility, perhaps the most useful attribute of the service has been Anvil’s ability to help clients proactively drive carbon out of their supply chain by providing insights into different strategies/approaches and the net impact of them when fully implemented. Examples of this in recent times have been the move of a UK-based client to a purely electric vehicle fleet for deliveries. Visibility into the net carbon impact allowed the organisation to properly evaluate the holistic impact of the initiative.
What roles do market data and commodity insights play in the business model?
Whilst not exclusively the case, a large portion of Anvil’s product offerings are powered by a client’s invoicing data.
In practical and efficient terms, this means that once Anvil’s team of data experts have successfully cleansed and categorised the data, a series of products can be quickly implemented. These efficiencies are both reflected in the pricing model and also the number of modules/solutions which Anvil’s average client buys into – with this number now approaching three products on average.
This shift in ‘average basket size’ is reflective of a market keen for both best-of-breed tools and a toolkit which is easily accessible and follows the same design language. Anvil has capitalised on this by expanding its analytical suite whilst at the same time, maintaining relationships with other key providers within the space for clients wanting to have an integrated Source to Contract system, for example including modules such as Contract Management and even eSourcing.
Away from the world of Carbon Management and a simple 1:1 engagement, Anvil has been working across the world of Private Equity to develop their ‘cube of cubes’ solution. This has enabled large portfolio organisations to look across their world of spend to drive spend-based efficiencies across all portfolio companies tackling complex challenges such as cash delivery and financial savings. As part of this work, Anvil partner directly with a number of global procurement services organisations to provide a holistic service to their Private Equity clients.
Where can readers find further information?
If you’d like to learn more about Anvil’s product range or even watch a series of short product demonstrations, the best place to visit is www.anvilanalytical.com.
The team can additionally be reached via the Anvil Analytical LinkedIn page.
ADDED VALUE
Events
Richard highlights how Anvil Analytical is attending more industry events to network and engage with procurement professionals.
“Members of the Anvil team can increasingly be found at procurement conferences across Europe and North America,” says Richard. “The team have just returned from their first sponsorship and speaking slot at the Amsterdam based DPW event and can next be found at PSI London in March 2025.”
Connect with Richard
