A spreadsheet can hold a supplier’s price. It struggles to hold the conversation that makes the price meaningful. Who requested the purchase? Which requirements matter? Has anyone checked the delivery terms? Scout RFP grew in the space between those questions, where enterprise buying becomes a procession of files, follow-ups, and people waiting for somebody else.
- The job: coordinate sourcing projects, supplier bids, and negotiations.
- The opening: make procurement easier for colleagues and suppliers to participate in.
- The outcome: a 2019 Workday acquisition, followed by the Workday Strategic Sourcing name in 2020.
01 / Before the bid, the conversation
Scout’s four founders began in a Cleveland-area basement in 2014. Their backgrounds included software entrepreneurship, finance, and design. An early investor recalled a plan to speak with at least 200 procurement professionals before designing the product. One prospective customer required 40 contacts before a demonstration. The team eventually won the account. The founders were learning how difficult it was to get access to the people whose work they hoped to improve.
Andrew Durlak later described the outreach at Northwestern’s entrepreneurial hub. His account emphasized volume: conversations with thousands of procurement professionals helped him anticipate objections and refine answers. Early business ideas had failed. The useful discovery was that procurement friction kept appearing in growing companies. A buyer’s tedious routine could become someone else’s expansion bottleneck.
02 / Give the purchase a front door
The product’s starting point is wonderfully unglamorous: somebody needs something. Intake forms capture the request. A pipeline makes the project visible. Procurement can prioritize the work, establish milestones, and involve the people who understand the requirements. That matters because an RFP is only useful when the question it asks is sufficiently clear.
Consider a company seeking implementation services for a new software system. The technology team understands compatibility; finance understands the budget; procurement understands the supplier process. Workday’s current sourcing materials use a CRM implementation project to illustrate the shared view. The point is to connect milestones, approvals, suppliers, and sourcing events without requiring everyone to reconstruct the project from their inbox.
A purchase gets a route through the organization. Illustrative workflow, not a product screenshot.
The tools cover requests for information, proposals, and quotations, alongside reverse auctions. Supplier responses can be examined side by side. Event Analysis supports additional columns and formulas, allowing teams to compare bids and calculate potential savings. A supplier can receive feedback while negotiations continue. The buying decision becomes something the team can examine together.
03 / The person outside procurement
Scout’s competitive argument depended on participation. An elaborate sourcing system accomplishes little when colleagues avoid it or suppliers struggle to respond. Email and spreadsheets already have one considerable advantage: everyone knows them. To displace that habit, a specialist application must make the shared task easier enough to justify learning another tool.
In 2016, Splunk described using Scout for self-service competitive sourcing as the company grew. Its procurement director, Rendi Miller, said automation let the team manage more spend and devote more attention to strategic projects. That is a more interesting promise than a prettier bidding form: the same team could take on more work.
“Scout is helping us deliver essential resources to the business faster, at a lower cost.”Rendi Miller, Splunk · 2016
The customer mix crossed industries. Scout’s January 2019 announcement named Starbucks, Gilead, VMware, Conagra, and Zebra Technologies among more than 175 enterprise customers, with users in 117 countries. This was enterprise software sold to organizations with recurring sourcing needs. Healthcare use cases now include evaluating equipment requests against clinical outcomes and cost. Comparing prices is only part of the assignment.
04 / First a partner, then a buyer
Scout sold subscriptions. Its financing followed the familiar venture-backed sequence: a $2.75 million seed round, $9 million Series A, and $15.5 million Series B. In January 2019, Scale Venture Partners led a $33 million Series C. Workday Ventures and Salesforce Ventures joined as strategic investors. Scout reported approximately $60.3 million raised in total.
Workday’s investment came with a software partnership and plans to connect Scout with Workday Procurement. In November, Workday announced an acquisition for approximately $540 million in cash, subject to adjustments. It closed on December 9. Later financial statements recorded $513 million in purchase consideration: $485 million cash and $28 million for Workday’s previously held equity interest. The headline deal figure and the accounting figure describe different measures.
The founders said they had not been looking to sell. Workday’s values and wider distribution helped change their minds. For Workday, the fit was source-to-pay: connecting the supplier selection process with purchasing and financial operations. The specialist had become part of a much larger purchasing apparatus.
05 / The savings need a second column
By late 2020, Scout had become Workday Strategic Sourcing. Workday reported more than 300 global businesses using it. One automotive distributor, unnamed in Workday’s account, had reduced manual process time from 13 days to three. Such examples describe individual customers, rather than a result every buyer should expect.
A useful lesson lies in the measurement. Workday supports reporting on projected and realized savings. A favorable negotiated price does not automatically become money returned to a budget. Teams need a baseline, actual spending, and agreement with finance about what counts. Otherwise the dashboard can celebrate a saving the organization never receives.
For teams evaluating the product, begin with one repeatable purchasing category. Define the requirements, reuse the questions, assign ownership, and measure the handoffs. Workday’s setup guidance recommends shared event templates. Reverse auctions require particular care: suppliers must be competing for comparable work, with quality and delivery considered alongside price. Software cannot rescue an ambiguous specification.
Scout’s opening remains recognizable. A company may know how much it spends while knowing surprisingly little about how its buying decisions happen. Give those decisions a visible route, and procurement can join the conversation earlier. The spreadsheet still has its uses. Being the entire purchasing department need not be one of them.