Our Solutions

SPEND ANALYSIS

How are we spending? This is always THE basic approach to trigger any category management OR strategic sourcing roll out at an organisation. Although the question seems very simple and obvious, many organisations struggle to find the accurate and real answer. This is because the spend is managed by various stake holders across the organisation and this spend data is also scattered in discrete data lakes. Even if a technology is deployed to capture all the spend transactions, many at times it suffers from “garbage in – garbage out” syndrome.

Spend analysis can be done using any or multiple approaches as below

  1. Tail End spend analysis – this is simple application of Pareto’s Law of 80/20.
  2. Vendors spend analysis – How much do we spend vendor-wise.
  3. Category spend analysis – How much do we spend across respective well-defined spend areas
  4. Item spend analysis – is done at SKU level
  5. Payment Term spend analysis – captures spend across different payment terms
  6. Contract spend analysis – brings out non-compliant spends and hidden spend-leakages.

A typical demography of spend at any organisation may look like an inverted pyramid as below. Higher the VALUE derived at the bottom of the pyramid, better is the Procurement Performance!!

Spend analysis once done appropriately can open-up the following windows of opportunities.

Identify Saving Opportunities

Perform Benchmarks

Redistribute Sourcing

Manage Supplier Relationships

Improve Legal Compliance

Quantify Savings

Improve processes

Reduce Maverick Spend

Recover Over-payments

Manage Risks

Manage Co-operative spend

Improve Diversity Spend

CATEGORY MANAGEMENT

It is the process of pooling similar products into a singular category and then addressing all business initiatives for that category as a whole. It is a strategic approach to procurement where organisations segment their spend into areas which contain similar or related products enabling focus opportunities for consolidation and efficiency. E.g. Direct versus Indirect materials, Raw Materials versus Packaging Materials, Capital items versus Spare Parts, Utilities versus Consumables, and Professional services versus Business services and so on.

The Key Success factors are:

  1. Cross functional talents
  2. State-of-the are spend analytics
  3. Total Cost of Ownership
  4. Stakeholder involvement
  5. Written Sourcing Plans
  6. Performance calculation and reporting

Strategic Sourcing is a subset of Category Management and triggers the beginning of the long term sourcing plan for the defined spend category. It represents the First Mile value delivery of the entire sourcing journey of the spend category.

Category Manager is a Key Role in procurement which is working on slew of missions and is exhibiting diverse capabilities.

ePROCUREMENT

It is nothing but digitally synchronising all the procurement processes and activities across the organisation on a single technology platform. It is application of leading edge technologies to help organisations buy smarter, faster and better. It has several important touch points with internal stakeholders & external suppliers and service providers. It provides transparency in business allocations for third party spend and also supports compliance by providing audit trails of all the decision making transactions. To get best value out of this tool, it needs to be treated as an enabler for procurement efficiency and not as a mundane data entry activity. It is a myth that eProcurement is primarily an IT related service OR is meant for a Data Analytics for research and scenario simulations.

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SUPPLIER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

It is rightly said that Procurement is as strong as its suppliers! And as its corollary, procurement efficiency reflects how good or bad relationship procurement enjoys with its suppliers. However, it does not mean that procurement should have same relationship with all its suppliers. An organisation must dissect its supplier base and apply supplier segmentation tool. Each segment is then managed with appropriate relationship strategy. Group of suppliers in the same segment shall have same relationship with the procurement. Each segment offers unique opportunities of improvement and can be driven though same set of initiatives. SRM starts delivering value when all the cost reduction options are exhausted. Adequate engagement of internal stakeholders across supplier segments is key to derive sustainable value from the supplier base.

RISK MANAGEMENT

Every organisation operates in a highly uncertain business environment and still needs to march ahead to sustain and grow. These uncertainties pose risks to the organisation and the success depends on how it approaches and manages these risks. Ensure that risks are identified, communicated and appropriate mitigation plans are actioned. The ultimate delivery of procurement function is to ensure an un-broken supply chain at all the times. And this calls for end-to-end visibility of procurement activities and understanding of all possible risks for successful execution of these activities. Risk management is too-often treated as a compliance issue that can be solved by drawing up lots of rules and making sure that all employees follow them. Many such rules, of course, are sensible and do reduce some risks that could severely damage a company. But rules-based risk management will not diminish either the likelihood or the impact of a disaster. The final aim for any risk management process is to minimise its impact even though it does not have any control on its occurrence. An organisation should tailor its Risk Management process for different categories of Risks and can deploy appropriate technology for predictive analysis of these risks.