Quyntess CTO on the Tradeshift app experience [interview]

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

TS: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us. It’d be good to understand your role at Quyntess and your involvement with the Tradeshift integration.

TB: I’m the CTO and Supply Chain Solution Architect at Quyntess, and I’ve been involved since the partnership became serious. That was the end of 2014. We had our heritage of supply chain management and traditional web applications, then we brought that to the platform of Tradeshift. We developed a series of apps: Order Collaboration, e-Logistics, and recently adding the Delivery Schedule app.

We were able to do this in a short time frame and have been expanding them ever since. It was quite a leap forward for us in terms of user interface.

TS: Can you walk us through the benefits of the app and how customers would use it?

TB: Compared to the standard purchase order app, we draw on our decade-plus experience to offer all the features for intensive collaboration between the buyer and supplier. If the buyer wishes, he can stay in his ERP system, but the supplier can be integrated. This is even if the supplier would previously have been too small. Now, you get a single collaboration platform. We call it “the single version of the truth.”

The buyer and supplier can be sure they are always looking at the same data when talking about a particular purchase order, especially in highly volatile environments such as aerospace, with frequent MRP changes driven by airplane assembly line schedules. In the past, this used to happen by phone, email, or fax. That’s of course not the process you want in 2016.

TS: If you were to expand that to the AP Automation space on the platform…

TB: That is, of course, the next step in the story. In our Purchase Order app, there is now an invoice button. The supplier is able to flip that PO to an invoice. All the data has been prepared so the two-way matching process and all the other AP handling has been fully automated and seamlessly integrated.

TS: Can you talk a bit about the integration of the apps for our joint customer Vesuvius?

TB: Order collaboration is the beginning of the process, now purchase orders are being sent from the Vesuvius ERP system. They arrive in the order collaboration app. This is Vesuvius Poland, with a number of Polish suppliers, as well as other Eastern European countries, like the Czech Republic and Hungary.

A very positive word about the onboarding, which was performed from Copenhagen and where we saw the Tradeshift team for Vesuvius do a really good job. In a short time frame, many suppliers were onboarded. Further rollout is expected to happen as we’re not in pilot mode anymore.

TS: You probably have your own position on what network-powered means. What does that look like?

TB: What you see with the Tradeshift platform is you have a network of many, many parties who could participate with each other. What we have always found, in all the implementations we did, you need to offer a web UI. You don’t want to miss the long-tail of 80% of your smaller suppliers during onboarding.

TS: As a technologist in the supply chain space, I’m sure you have some opinions on what the 4th Industrial Revolution means for supply chain management. What does it look like in 2025?

TB: There is a lot we can already see happening. We can also see there are a number of steps to get where you are going. For example, as a warehouse employee will use your smartphone to perform more actions. We are seeing the first sign of this happening with truckers and freight cargo solutions on some outbound logistics.

Smartphones are being used as part of claims management and barcode reading technology. You still see quite a disconnect between the administrative part of supply chain management and what is physically happening.

I also foresee there will be much more voice-driven functionality. The way you handle smartphones with your fingers is just awkward for industrial users like an entry clerk. I expect a lot of things to happen around voice control and information processing.

It’s not only technology, it’s very much awareness. Mainly, the attitude of people in the supply chain, people will work together collaboratively and less in silos.

TS: That’s wonderful. Thank you for all those perspectives and great to hear working with Tradeshift has been such a positive experience.