Spend Analytics

Whether you are a public sector authority trying to reduce a large deficit, or a private business striving to achieve more control over costs, the likelihood is that you are hampered by a lack of visibility of actual spending and how this compares with plans, targets and peer activity. The more subsidiaries, departments, products, services and suppliers there are, the harder it will be to see the bigger picture, especially if processes are being managed by different finance systems.

Spend Analytics from Advanced Business Solutions tackles this challenge head on. Spend Analytics is designed for any organisation seeking to reduce procurement spending. It enables finance managers to analyse and report on spending performance across all divisions, products, services and suppliers. Spend Analytics can draw data from any order finance systems, procurement systems and tendering systems to give an instant snapshot of spending activity and how this compares with targets, previous months’ performance, and the amounts paid by different business units and/or suppliers for similar items.

Traditional procurement systems are unable to deliver this level of intelligence without significant manual intervention, which can be time consuming and lead to human error. With Spend Analytics, data extraction and analysis is automatic and can be initiated on demand, according to the user’s choice of parameters. Data is drawn into a provided data warehouse, where it is consolidated and ‘cleaned’ to ensure that suppliers and products are recognised consistently, even if they are referred to slightly differently from one system to another.

Spend Analytics is a powerful tool as it allows managers to spot anomalies, for example, if one department is paying more than another for the same product. Armed with this information, the business can initiate better deals, lowering costs. Maverick spending can be pinpointed, so, if the organisation has dictated that 80% of procurement should be according to a contract or a designated framework, for example, it can monitor whether this policy is being adhered to and how this varies across business units, or over time. The operational processing of orders and invoices can also be monitored, such as time taken between invoice receipt and payment, thus enabling operational improvement and greater efficiencies.

Getting started

For more information on Spend Analytics, download the fact sheet.