All-in-one doesn't always mean All-I-need

Who is choosing an all-in-one solution and for what reason

We would like to divide the market here into 3 different categories:

Large enterprises: companies with a revenue of more than 5 billion

Companies of this size have a central "tools & processes" team that takes care of tools and processes. This department has between 5 and 50 employees and mostly reports to the purchasing manager, but at the same time works closely with IT. Not only are standard processes defined here, but tools are also selected for the individual sub-processes. These companies often choose the best-of-breed approach for the following reasons:

1. The individual purchasing departments (indirect procurement, direct procurement, risk management, CSR) are relatively large and have very sophisticated and very mature processes, which is why the functionality of standard tools or all-in-one providers is often not sufficient. Best-of-breed providers are usually also innovation leaders in their field, since they only have to focus on a sub-area, which is why the large companies benefit particularly from these providers.
2. If you choose different best-of-breed providers, you end up with more interfaces between the systems, which on the one hand have to be developed and on the other hand also have to be maintained. For this task, you need experts who understand the purchasing processes well, but also have the appropriate IT know-how to understand which data is to be exchanged between the systems and which system is the leading system. The large companies have exactly these employees, which is why they can also integrate best-of-breed providers into an existing landscape.
3. Large corporations also usually have very active M&A processes and also have holdings/subsidiaries in relatively different areas and industries. Since the degree of coverage of an all-in-one solution is then often low for different subsidiaries, a decision is often made in favor of a combination of best-of-breed providers, which are connected to a central SRM system (Supplier Relationship Management), which can also serve as MDM (Master Data Management) tool.

Medium enterprises: companies with a revenue between 500m and 5b

Companies of this size also have a department for "tools & processes", but the department is usually relatively small and consists of only 1 to 5 people. Here, the process know-how is usually more pronounced than the IT know-how, since most of the resources are used directly from the IT department for the implementation and maintenance of the interfaces. These companies usually try to select an all-in-one provider for the following reasons:

1. Working with the internal IT department is often difficult, since the IT department usually has little process know-how and views the project purely from an IT point of view. In addition, today almost every department does not have sufficient resources to implement projects, which is why every purchasing department tries to implement projects that require as little IT support as possible. And that is exactly the advantage of an all-in-one solution.
2. Most all-in-one solutions offer consistent standard processes that can be implemented as best practice. In a homogeneous process landscape, this is a great advantage for many companies, since they can benefit from the best practice processes of the vendor and do not have to do their own process reengineering here. For this reason, the references of a specific industry are very important for potential software buyers, since they assume that the vendor understands them better if they have already implemented x projects in exactly this industry.

Small and medium businesses (SMB): companies with a revenue of less than 500m

Companies with a turnover of less than 500 million and in particular companies with a turnover of less than 200 million usually do not have a dedicated department for the implementation of tools and the development of standard processes. This means that most of the initiative comes from the purchasing manager, who divides the work between his team of 5 to 15 buyers, but often also works very intensively on the software implementation himself.

In the past, these companies mostly did not use any purchasing tools at all and mapped everything via the ERP system or Excel. Since the pandemic, these companies have been digitizing much more intensively and are looking for providers with whom they can speak at eye level. The following requirements are particularly important to these companies:

1. An easy start without high costs for integration or customizing (also for reasons of risk reduction, if it doesn't work as planned).
2. Super simple operation with no special functions that are difficult to understand (larger providers sometimes also deliver a simpler version of their complex solution here, but in general there are now also providers who specialize in the SMB market and have a great advantage here).
3. Best practice in the area of implementation and rollout strategy (since the companies do not have a large budget for consulting, the transfer of know-how usually does not take place in 1:1 sessions but in the form of user communities and webinars, in which several companies can take part at the same time and which do not incur high costs for the provider).

What has changed since 2024

A third option has become established between all-in-one suites and best-of-breed tools: intake and orchestration platforms such as Zip, ORO Labs or Omnea. They sit in front of the existing ERP and suite, give every employee one simple entry point and route each request to the right process. For many companies this has made the question "suite or best-of-breed" less critical, because the user no longer sees which system is working in the background. At the same time, suites keep buying specialists (Coupa acquired Cirtuo and Scoutbee in 2025), so the line between the two models is blurring. See our procurement market landscape for an overview.

Who decides on new procurement tools?

To understand why companies choose a suite or best-of-breed tools, you need to know who makes the decision. In most larger companies this is not the CPO alone, but a dedicated department called Processes & Tools (also "procurement excellence"), which reports to the CPO and works closely with IT.

• In large companies, this team has the people and the budget to build tools itself. More and more of its members develop their own applications and AI agents with Claude or other AI models and connect them to the existing suite.
• In the mid-market, the team is small or does not exist. These companies usually buy ready-made tools for the individual processes, partly because it is hard for them to attract AI specialists.

For software vendors and investors, Processes & Tools is therefore the most important contact in the customer's organisation.

A typical org chart of a larger production company

Click on a position to see its tasks.

In production companies, the team in indirect procurement is much smaller than the team in direct procurement, even though indirect procurement handles most of the purchase orders. Direct procurement buys the production materials, which make up the largest share of spend and carry the highest risk.

The matrix behind direct procurement

Behind direct procurement in a production company there is usually its own matrix organisation, organised by category (also called commodity or material group) and by region. Global category managers define the strategy for their category worldwide, regional heads ensure supply for the plants in their region, and the buyers in each cell report to both. The example below shows how this works.

In addition, many companies have project buyers who are responsible for all purchased parts of one product, regardless of the category. They follow the category strategies, which is why these strategies need to be available in the tools and not only in PowerPoint. See Category Management for an example.