How SpendHQ Exemplifies Successful Procurement Analytics

Procurement is no longer there just to buy goods and services at the cheapest price. With the changing global economy leading businesses to rethink how they buy and from whom, they have two options: source strategically or watch external factors eat away at margins.

In this evolving landscape, procurement now has a vital role to play, rising to the challenge; they must arm themselves with procurement analytics.

SpendHQ is the leading best-in-class provider of enterprise spend intelligence and procurement performance management solutions.

The company's SaaS products help customers move faster from the challenges of disparate spend and project data to clear value creation in one integrated experience, by producing actionable spend analytics insights that drive new initiatives, goals and reporting of procurement's impact.

Backed by nearly 20 years of procurement expertise and with more than 500 customers worldwide, SpendHQ's solutions drive better financial and non-financial outcomes, advance procurement maturity and demonstrate impact with data.

What is procurement analytics?

Harnessing the value of data is a vital necessity; this is where procurement analytics come in. Through this tool, companies can take raw purchasing data and put them into a holistic view of their sourcing behaviour.

This aids procurement in helping to uncover improvement opportunities and proactively manage categories, mitigate risk, capitalise on ESG opportunities and secure greater cost savings.

The importance of procurement data analytics

Because of the complexity of procurement's responsibilities, there is no way to manually keep up with all the details involved in just maintaining the status quo, let alone improve it. With raw data, or an incomplete picture of spending, critical opportunities remain hidden – leading to serious risk.

However, by harnessing raw data and insights, procurement analytics makes problems, opportunities and categories easy to see. Instead of digging through data, teams can focus on executing strategic initiatives.

Here are a few specific ways procurement data analytics increases procurement's value:

• See trends of all types early and proactively prevent issues
• Accomplish more with fewer resources and save on talent investments
• Deliver more value and spread impact to new areas of the business
• Monitor and fix savings leakages fast and with less manual monitoring effort
• Make environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategy a regular area of value delivery
• Quickly spot process inefficiencies and their causes
• Proactively manage supplier relationships and contracts
• Find complex, far-reaching opportunities that manual data science won't uncover
• Understand and manage third-party risk in the supply chain

Key benefits of using analytics in procurement

By using analytics, not only does it uncover opportunities and aid teams in avoiding disasters, it also changes everything about how procurement works – thus giving the function the space to move from cost cutters to organisational enablers. There is great value to extract from analytics, which provides immense value to procurement teams.

Data-driven decision-making

Enabling procurement leaders to prioritise initiatives and projects based on the potential value to business goals. Giving teams the chance to have more efficient resource allocation and focus on high-impact activities.

Cost savings

Analytics can help to uncover opportunities to make savings, execute projects with speed and discover the best options for cost reductions. Giving organisations the chance to optimise spending patterns, negotiate better deals with suppliers and improve overall financial performance.

Enhanced supplier relationships

By giving teams a holistic view of supplier performance, procurement teams can address issues proactively, negotiate contracts more effectively and make informed decisions when selecting new suppliers. Leading to better supplier management and risk mitigation.

Risk management

Analytics can find and mitigate a range of risks, including disruptions to the supply chain, cyber threats, vendor financial instability and ESG-related issues. All of which are crucial for maintaining compliance and protecting the organisation's reputation.

SpendHQ gives its customers the chance to better meet regulatory requirements to assess supplier risk for their procurement projects, by using spend and performance insights that combine with data from external sources including Dun & Bradstreet, Credit Safe, Rapid Ratings, EcoVadis, Darkbeam, E-Attestations and more thanks to pre-built application connectors.

Pierre Laprée, Chief Product Officer of SpendHQ, says: “Procurement can significantly impact ESG progress, but a better approach has been needed to easily identify opportunities to make a bigger impact and to accurately measure procurement’s contribution. 

“As new regulations are introduced, businesses need a clear, holistic view into non-financial performance to identify which procurement levers will help them reduce emissions, diversify their supplier networks and comply with governance changes. 

“Our new capabilities allow businesses to connect ESG spend insights with immediate, collaborative action to prioritise your next initiatives in these areas and ultimately contribute to making the world a better place.”

Improved forecasting and budget management

Through the use of data, teams can more accurately forecast and budget alignments with the actual requirements. Helping to prevent stockouts or overstocking and thus optimising resource allocation.

Efficiency and process optimisation

Organisations can use procurement data to find bottlenecks in the purchase order cycle and streamline processes – leading to reduced lead times and improved overall efficiency.

Strategic insights

Procurement analytics transform the function from a mere "cost cutter" to a strategic enabler, providing valuable insights for business development, market research and performance benchmarking.

To fully leverage these benefits, organisations should invest in procurement analytics tools that offer comprehensive spend visibility, data enrichment options, regular data refreshes and project management capabilities.

SpendHQ: Procurement Analytics in Action

SpendHQ's platform has helped over 500 procurement organisations around the world gain a comprehensive, holistic perspective on their opportunities and then do something about them.

With 97% spend visibility, 40+ data and platform integrations, intuitive workflows and a cutting-edge performance management module, SpendHQ takes analytics from opportunity finder to impact enabler.

As a provider of advanced spend intelligence and procurement performance management solutions, it helps procurement by creating a centralised system for the classification of all spent data – as well as looking after the sourcing project pipeline and results.

It aids procurement leaders in managing the strategic impact and effectiveness of their practices while providing organisations assistance with their strategic priorities and setting goals to demonstrate the impact and value of procurement processes in a data-driven, transparent manner.

SpendHQ is designed to enhance planning, oversight of outcomes and reporting mechanisms.

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