There's a decision point that comes up repeatedly in trade spend conversations, and it tends to follow a familiar pattern. A manufacturer reaches a certain scale, looks at what they're spending on outside solutions, and starts wondering whether they could just build something internal. In iTradeNetwork's recent Fireside Chat, Solutions Advisor Dean Rallo and Senior Solutions Advisor Drew Shields both watched this play out more than once, and the outcome is not usually what companies anticipate going in.

The In-House Temptation

It makes sense on paper. Large companies have engineering resources, internal data, and strong incentives to own their own tools. Some never get past the planning stage. Others build something, get it running, and then quietly shut it down after the reality of maintaining it sets in. The conclusion tends to be the same: the investment required to do it well isn't justified by the outcome.

As Drew Shields noted, "It's not worth the dollars we're putting into this to try to build it from scratch."

The Single-Sided Data Problem

Beyond the cost, there's a more fundamental limitation that even well-resourced internal builds run into. Any solution a manufacturer builds internally can only work with the data that manufacturer has access to. That's a significant constraint in a space where the value comes from understanding patterns across the entire ecosystem.

A company that specializes in trade spend management sees data flowing across hundreds of manufacturers, distributors, and GPO relationships. That breadth creates something an internal tool simply can't replicate: the ability to normalize data at scale, recognize patterns across the network, and apply learnings that no single company's dataset could surface on its own. The economy of scale that comes from that kind of aggregated data is where the analytical power lives.

Core Business Is Core Business

There's also a strategic question underneath the build-versus-buy debate. Food and beverage manufacturers are exceptionally good at what they do. The internal energy that goes into scoping, building, and maintaining a trade spend platform is energy pulled away from the work that generates revenue in the first place.

Technology isn't the core business, and the companies that treat it like one usually feel the strain. When internal resources get pulled toward building and maintaining a trade spend platform, something gives, and it's rarely the manufacturing and distribution work that keeps the business running.

What Purpose-Built Means

This is the distinction iTradeNetwork's MarginIQ was designed around. Rather than asking manufacturers to become technology companies, MarginIQ brings the infrastructure, the normalized data, and the cross-network intelligence to them. The experience accumulated across the broader iTradeNetwork ecosystem gets applied directly to each manufacturer's claims process, without the overhead of building or maintaining anything in-house.

The companies that have tried to build it themselves and walked away aren't outliers. They ran the numbers, weighed the complexity, and made a rational call. Purpose-built solutions exist for exactly that reason.

Find out what that could mean for your operation with a personalized ROI assessment.

Catch the full conversation with Dean and Drew here.