How Does Arkestro Compare to Fairmarkit?

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.

Fairmarkit Key Features and Capabilities

• • • Request Management: easily create RFxs, review vendor responses, and award bids
    • Process Automation: touchless intake, streamlined vendor communication, and automatic bid collection
    • Vendor Recommendations: recommendation engine automatically identifies the best vendors for purchases
    • Spend Analytics: curated dashboards give instant visibility into key spend and performance metrics
    • Integrations: Fairmarkit fits seamlessly within existing workflows, automatically syncing data with ERP or P2P systems

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 Key Features and Capabilities

• • • Forecast Outcomes: sourcing with AI predictive pricing to beat the market and lock in better pricing faster than competitors while helping the sourcing team to become a strategic asset to business
    • Supplier Analytics: KPI dashboards through a secure portal for use with stakeholders, bringing visibility to the numbers that matter
    • Category Agnostic: proven results in direct and indirect materials, MRO, and CapEx, with a vast library of pre-built templates for indirect services and IT projects
    • Deeply Configurable: enables procurement team to award every line item to the right supplier (including logic for minimum order quantity, lead time, supplier certifications, and INCOTerms), with accelerated awards time to become suppliers’ highest priority customer
    • Data Reliability: data monitoring flags supplier data abnormalities for addressing and improved supplier relations while advanced optical character recognition eliminates the need to reformat data for input
    • Unlimited Users: pay for Arkestro without sunk costs or under-utilization because pricing depends on the number of SKUs instead of the number of users or licenses, and there is no limit on the number of projects or suppliers

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.

Relative Strengths of the Two Solutions 

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. 

Experience Arkestro Yourself 

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.