Spend Management-Impact Spend Data Quality
The single largest barrier to extracting real 'value' out of your existing investment in sourcing and procurement tools is DATA.

You may be one of the fortunate few who are aware of the quality of your 'spend data' , but most others are just waking up to the fact that over 65% of the commodity assignments on the data that their teams analyze are just plain wrong or too elementary (top-level), to drive any meaningful commodity level sourcing strategy.

So what are YOU going to do about it?
You can either do what your neighbor did. Farm the data out to a service provider and fork out a million dollars every couple of years. Or you could learn some of the best kept secrets of Fortune 100 organizations, and choose to attack the data problem first, in-house; before training your sight on new SRM tools and technologies.

Spend Visibility
Everyone is talking about it nowadays, and one of the companies that have undoubtedly created the biggest buzz in town is Zycus. Using their tools, customers of ARIBA and other Spend management software, are able to perform granular commodity classification (at a detailed item level) on spend data. Since the software is completely automated and plugs in to their existing infrastructure (Data warehouse and BI), the costs of implementing this solution is as low as it can get.

The benefits are phenomenal with some customers reporting over 10X return on their investments - just by reduction of classification costs alone. Additional savings (garnered in the range of 5-7% of total NPR spend) because of deep-down item level visibility is now an accepted fact. The fringe benefit of on-demand access to an enriched spend cube (that is refreshed weekly), to facilitate effective category management, is the icing on the cake.

This year, how are you going to manage your spend data. You can choose to learn from the leaders or do what your neighbor did. Click here to Learn more