Bamboo Rose: Reshaping Supplier Relationship Management

For the retail supply chain, Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) is the lifeblood of the operation. Without a strong relationship, operations can quickly fall apart and sight can be lost in the most important part of your business. Bamboo Rose is advancing SRM, spearheaded by Matt Stevens, the CEO.

With his extensive background in technology and experience in IT sales, Matt has become a pivotal figure in the company. His expertise has helped Bamboo Rose achieve an impressive 99% gross retention rate and greater than 130% net retention. As Bamboo Rose introduces new solutions like SRM, they continue to pave the way for retailers' future success. Once companies partner with Bamboo Rose, they rarely consider returning to a world without it.

“Your SRM needs to give the supplier, vendor and the retailer more efficiency out of their existing processes, their existing dollars spent and of course their existing teams,” Matt says.

To the CEO, effective SRM boils down to three key points. "Firstly, it needs to engage the full product lifecycle. Too often, SRM has been seen as a step in a process rather than an end-to-end continuous engagement. This is the foundation of an effective SRM platform.

"Secondly, self-education is crucial. When a retailer has more than 50 suppliers, the amount of communication and detail explodes exponentially. SRM must enable suppliers to work independently to understand the retailer's needs and initiatives. Efficiency, variety and quality are the main goals and they are only achievable if the system minimises manual entry and back-and-forth interactions.

"Efficiency is the third point. SRM should make processes more efficient, reducing the time and cost involved in buy-bid cycles. For example, reducing a cycle from 20 weeks to 12 weeks or even four weeks allows retailers to consider more vendors and offers, enhancing variety and quality."

It's all about communication, which Matt describes as an essential tool for effective supplier relationship management. Bamboo Rose allows suppliers to monitor their progress and understand expectations. Through the platform, users can review their performance and gain insights into areas for improvement.

Companies can log in and see how they are doing against the requirements day in and day out. So when teams come together to review the good and the bad, both sides are looking at the same set of data, fostering self-management and self-storage.

Bamboo Rose today

Bamboo Rose currently has over 200 employees, with 65% based in North America and a significant presence in India and the UK. The company is also growing teams in Australia, Hong Kong, and Canada. "We've done three acquisitions, with another pending, to accelerate our growth and expertise," Matt explains.

"This year, we'll break the US $50m revenue mark, growing over 30% profitably. We have about >250 customers, including 53 large enterprises, with a 99.7% retention rate and greater than 130% net retention."

The company has a strong base in SRM and recently acquired Supply Pilot, which has been a “great accelerator” of the business, according to Matt.

• In June, new features aimed at improving how retailers manage supplier engagement and data, addressing challenges such as data transparency, integrity and inefficient collaboration processes were rolled out in an advanced SRM offering which prioritises:

• Active performance management

• Improved communication

• Compliance tools

• Brand strategy alignment

• Responsiveness for real-time data-driven decisions

Bamboo Rose's ambition for continual improvement has also seen it achieve greater than 130% net retention, a SaaS metric the company is particularly proud of.

“Net retention simply says, if you didn't add a single new logo, how much would you grow just from your existing customers? So even if we didn't sell to a single new customer, we're still growing 130% just from our existing customers doing more with the platform, which again is strong feedback that we've got at least some of the stuff right here,” he adds.

What keeps customers loyal to Bamboo Rose?

So why is Bamboo Rose achieving these impressive levels of loyalty?

“We think of ourselves and we operate as a retail operating system,” Matt explains.

“We are the platform that all of our retailers build all their processes around. We integrate with your planning system, your suppliers, your ERPs and your distribution centre management systems. Bamboo Rose is at the very core of that. So when we think about our platform and we think about evolving our platform and we focus on expanding our values, we do so from the lens of an operating system and that makes us integral to the success of the company.”

Matt says this approach has made them “sticky”, while also incredibly flexible in their ability to shift with a changing business model.

“If there's a change of initiative or a change of strategy and a given retailer decides they want to pull back on e-tail and they want to go back to brick and mortar, or they want to expand into wholesale and move out of retail 100% and they want to expand into different geographies and wholesale's the way to do it, that's all going to flow through our system. We enable that kind of dynamism and that kind of agility and it just makes us key to the mission of the retailer.”

The role of AI in SRM and PLM

Every facet of the business world is being reshaped by AI and that is no different for Bamboo Rose, which is working with the technology to enhance its SRM offerings. Through the use of advanced AI and machine learning (ML), Bamboo Rose aims to upgrade and streamline supplier interactions, increase efficiency and automate complex workflows.

The integration of AI and ML into the SRM platform represents a major step forward for Bamboo Rose. Matt explains: "We look at AI and ML as the how; the what and the why of automation and efficiency and it's something we've been on a mission for and have delivered time and time again."

This approach has led to major enhancements in automation over the past 18 months.

One of these features improving the SRM capabilities is the ability to filter potential vendors. Matt says: "The true next level of automation comes in helping open up the top of the funnel for new and better suppliers via SRM."

Through the use of AI, the programme can narrow down thousands of potential vendors to find businesses the perfect fit, using a confidence score and allowing sourcing teams to make more informed decisions thanks to automated data analysis.

AI is also being used to reshape enterprise software workflows. Bamboo Rose recently acquired Backbone, a company known for its innovative operations to reduce workflow steps. Matt explained how this PLM system is particularly beneficial for businesses.

"If I have to go build a T-shirt and there's 17 steps for every T-shirt, I don't care if I already have a T-shirt, I still have to go through these 17 workflows as a retailer to build it," Matt says. His aim is to reduce the clicks and make these processes as simple as possible.

He spoke about how Bamboo Rose is "skipping the clicks". This initiative envisions a future where users can interact with the software through natural language, eliminating the need for traditional UI clicks. "What if you and I, who've never used enterprise software before, could just talk to the software?" he posits. This approach allows users to describe their requirements verbally and the AI generates the initial tech pack, which can then be refined by human designers.

"We're always striving to reduce the clicks and simplify the workflow," Matt emphasises.

The future of Bamboo Rose

Reflecting on Bamboo Rose's impressive growth trajectory, Matt acknowledges the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. "We're going to continue the growth," he says. As the company approaches and surpasses US $100m in revenue, maintaining a 30% year-over-year growth rate may become challenging. "I'd love to be able to tell myself and the team that yes, it is [sustainable]. We're acting like it is and we're hitting it," he added. He emphasises the importance of understanding growth at what cost and identifying the best avenues for expansion, whether through organic growth or mergers and acquisitions.

When asked about future developments for SRM at Bamboo Rose, Matt expresses enthusiasm for the evolving capabilities of its platform. "One of the things we're most excited about is the way our current SRM customers are using scorecards," he says. The scorecards are a popular feature and upcoming enhancements will allow customers to customise input parameters and create different scorecards for various vendors. "We think some of the scorecard enhancements are a near-term thing, but something that our customers are pretty excited about," he states.

Matt highlights efforts to reduce friction in the user interface (UI) and expand the use of SRM beyond the sourcing team. By integrating SRM into the planning and design phases, Bamboo Rose aims to streamline the entire product lifecycle. "The earlier they can be considered, the earlier you're collaborating," he explains. This approach allows for more innovative and efficient product development, with suppliers involved from the outset.

Looking ahead to the next year, Matt discusses Bamboo Rose's goals and plans. With retail being the world's second-largest economy, he emphasises the potential for global expansion. "Today, primarily, a big chunk of our customers are in North America. So we're excited about the potential of expanding our footprint of both existing customers that are going global and new customers that already are global," he says. While there is no specific target for international growth, he expresses a clear desire to increase Bamboo Rose's role in the global retail market.

Bamboo Rose focuses on sustained growth, innovative SRM enhancements and global expansion. By leveraging collaboration and technology, Bamboo Rose aims to continue its success and drive better outcomes for retailers and suppliers worldwide.