who are spend360

What matters when selecting a Spend Analysis partner is not how much they can tell you about their complex use of technology, algorithms and how great their rules-based approach is, but whether you can use the results to deliver insight, savings and efficiencies into the buying and sourcing process. Spend360 has come from an understanding of the requirements of users, and has been built to cater for their needs. All of our unique, complex technology has been hidden and only exist to deliver business benefit to the desktop.

Spend360 has grown from over 20 years of procurement best practice, large scale data quality integration and interrogation, and artificial intelligence knowledge to provide dynamic, actionable information anywhere in the world, synchronised, in multiple languages and currencies. These experiences have enabled us to provide a spend analysis capability to organisations of many sizes, ranging from small, local operations to global enterprises, across many sectors.

Our entrepreneurial approach has removed the traditional barriers to spend analysis enabling us to provide a solution which caters for the category management and cost management needs of Procurement and Finance professionals in global organisations through to smaller and medium sized companies and even individual departments.

Our technical expertise has been combined to remove the need for IT-centric building and maintenance of data extraction rules, transformation rules, classification rules to analyse billions of dollars of transactions and this allows us to leverage technology to deliver business benefits. These benefits manifest themselves in the completeness, speed of delivery, accuracy, and usability of your spend data to underpin cost management activities. The same benefits are amplified when your organisation's efforts move from sizing and understanding your spend, to executing programmes to manage or optimise it since we make spend analysis an easy, repeatable, stress-free process ensuring savings and compliance are tracked, and the results hit the bottom line.

Experience counts when you know your audience, your markets, your clients. Our business and IT knowledge is captured in Spend360 to deliver the ability to see many aspects of spend without having to drill down through endless dimensions in a data-warehouse cube. Most things can be discovered within one or two clicks without having to leave Spend360's dynamic presentation panels. For example, as well as custom outputs, we can typically provide the following outputs or combinations of outputs, without having to define a bunch of complex rules. These represent opportunities for your business to understand, aggregate, renegotiate and generate cash:

• Spend by Category, Department/Location/Region, Supplier, Buyer, Currency, Period etc
• Pareto analysis – top categories, suppliers etc
• Suppliers with multiple payment terms
• Supplier Parent/Child relationships
• Spend by approved/unapproved supplier
• Average payment terms and payment terms variances
• 20 other category, spend, finance and compliance outputs

what can spend360 do for you

Spend Analysis with the Spend360 solution provides insight into your complete spend, of all types, from all sources, with all of your suppliers – not just the top ones. This complete and accurate view can then be used to underpin key activities such as:

• Sourcing
• Auctions
• Contract management
• Compliance
• Supplier consolidation

Using spend analysis to underpin these activities results directly in cost reduction and cash-generation/preservation. The benefits of Spend360’s complete view, and the actions that arise from it, accrue to both Finance and Procurement functions and are measureable at balance sheet level.

Most organisations have a good view of their Direct spend and it is “under management”, meaning that someone is managing it, it is optimised, and that appropriate contracts and compliance measures are in place, but what about Indirect spend? Even the best-in-class companies can improve in this area.

Take a look at the key points from the following independent sources to see if this applies to your organisation :

• More than 80% of organisations do not have comprehensive, accurate, repeatable spend analysis capability. (source Aberdeen Group)
• 82% of Finance Directors have limited or zero view of indirect spend (source CFO.Com)
• Anything up to 60% of spend may not be “under management”. (source Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply)
• 91% of purchasing professionals agree they need more, and better,data to manage their relationships with suppliers. (source ABC)
• Current market conditions have had a “significant impact” on more than 75% of Procurement functions in organsitions surveyed, and of these 55% had experienced substantial budget cuts, whilst 59% had aggressive savings targets. (source Accenture)
• The average number of sources of spend data in most organisations is greater than 9. (source Aberdeen Group)
• Consistently over the last three years, on average, over 51% of organisations have reported that the volume and complexity of data sources, the inability to extract data, and it’s poor quality is inhibiting their ability to do spend analysis. (source Aberdeen Group)

Spend360 addresses all of the critical issues outlined above. If some or all of these points apply to your organisation then call us and take the opportunity to quickly start adding value to the bottom line.

where are spend360

Since Spend360 is effectively a service, with a very small client footprint for free viewers,or chargeable power-users it is a very cost-effective solution to any size organisation, in any industry, including public sector, in most currencies and languages.

We have worked with some very large organisations and some very small ones. Each receives the same high level of service and accuracy, and each has highly actionable, correctly classified spend data to support and enable cash generation programmes.

We have Retail, Hospitality, Manufacturing, Distribution, Finance and Insurance customers as well as key partnerships with Global Advisory bodies and technology partners like IBM where the blend of our ability to execute on delivering spend analysis is matched with the advisory bodies ability to create and execute programmes to deliver the savings opportunities we have identified.

Anecdotes are plentiful in terms of benefits which have accrued ranging from the customer who said “ability to turn around spend classification so quickly probably means about another $1m per month in additional savings for us”, to the customer who’s existing provider was taking 16 weeks to turn around what we turned around in 72 hours, to the customer who uses Spend360 as part of their category management aspirations to deliver savings of 2-10% across £3bn of spend.

Some of these companies had no spend analysis capability at all and we have made it easy for them to gain insight into their spend by breaking down the technology, data quality and classification challenges they faced. Others had spend analysis capability which was deficient in terms of elapsed time to complete, cost of ownership, or manual or rules-based effort to complete an analysis. We were able to reduce the time, cost and effort , and in some cases increase the accuracy, of their spend analysis.

Our broad range of experiences, and a clean sheet of paper, gave us the ideal opportunity to design a solution from scratch, based on over 20 years of procurement best practice, large scale data integration and artificial intelligence knowledge. This experience has resulted in a product which removes the needs for manual, rules-based data extraction, transformation and classification (which prevents reuse) and armies of technicians or consultants to perform the categorisation we can run in minutes. This means there is no industry or sector to which we cannot provide accurate, timely, granular, repeatable, actionable spend data.

why do spend analysis with spend360?

Companies that do Spend Analysis save 67% more than companies that do no not (source Aberdeen Group). Spend Analysis underpins category management in many respects. Actionable data from Spend360, within a click or two, specific to your category, department, company, group, operating division, or complete enterprise, with supporting detail, means that collaborative decisions can be made quickly and easily. The design of spend360 and unique way in which it enriches and classifies your spend data means that spend analysis is a rapid, repeatable process, completed in days or weeks, rather than months or years.

Actionable spend analysis data feeds category management, sourcing, contract management, auctions, and SRM activities designed to reduce Direct and Indirect costs which should feed your bottom line. The ability to do it repeatedly ensures that hotspots and priorities are addressed, that you can measure progress, reprioritise where required, and truly focus on optimising your supplier costs in volatile market conditions.

Since many organisations typically rely on cumbersome data-warehousing solutions, or periodic, incomplete, proprietary transactional reports from multiple ERP systems, by definition there will be delays in the collection of, and inconsistencies in, the data. Further interpretation and classification is an additional drain on resource, adds time and cost, and may well still provide inaccurate results. Critical decisions are then made, based upon erroneous information and savings may well not be maximised . As a consequence, cost reductions of 5-20% may not be realised.

Actioning accurate Spend Analysis data can release the cash stored in deficient contracts and relationships. This cash can benefit many financial ratios. For example it is estimated that the Earnings Per Share (EPS) benefits of this type, depending upon industry, are between 2% and 10%.

how can you benefit from spend360

Spend360 addresses the challenges of accurate and repeatable Spend Analysis by breaking down the barriers to collecting, enriching, classifying and reporting spend data. This means that users can use the complete spend profile to drive savings to the bottom line in a way that suits them. Spend360 uses a unique artificial intelligence approach that delivers the following:

• Completeness – Spend360 takes the complete profile, normalises, enriches and classifies it – effectively reducing the need for costly, inefficient and time consuming rules-based integration and transformation of raw data.
• Accuracy – enriching your data, driving up the quality, and accurately classifying your spend to your own hierarchy and/or UNSPSC ensures data represents spend profiles as you want them, maximising benefits for users, departments, divisions and complete enterprises.
• Granularity – taking the complete spend record, enriching and classifying it ensures that wherever supporting detail is required to capture a savings opportunity or address a process error it is available in no more than 2 clicks
• Timeliness – without an ERP-sized investment, turnaround from collection to enrichment and usability is measured in days or weeks and not months.
• Usability - In addition to providing 27 out-of-the-box reports, Spend360 provides powerful customisation for power-users to create their own reports, as well as the ability to create email, PDF and Powerpoint output to share and present to other parts of the organisation. The standard reports provide Procurement and Finance perspectives on the spend data.

There is immense flexibility in method of collection of source data and a virtually zero footprint. Key benefits of this approach include:

• Very low barriers to adoption and rapid and easy roll out to the user community
• Massively reduced burden on IT departments as Spend360 automatically executes all extraction and transformational activities.
• Flexibility as to how source data can be collected (from low-tech manual to high-tech automated) and classified removes traditional barriers to adoption and dramatically reduces time to benefit.

The design and architecture of Spend360 means that preliminary categorisation of spend can be done in a matter of days, replacing what currently takes months, is inaccurate, not detailed enough, or not done at all. This fact alone means that opportunities to make savings through optimisation of downstream activities such as auctions, supplier consolidation etc can be brought forward by months, increasing savings by, on average, 28%.

Spend360 contains logic and expertise, to provide for different industry and category requirements, that automates many of the traditional tasks associated with answering seemingly simple questions about spend. Spend360 technology provides repeatable, low cost outputs that are more accurate, more detailed and more quickly available than traditional, in-house approaches.

resources & downloads

Help yourself to downloads of helpful information including Spend360 product overviews and positioning papers, as well as analyst papers to guide you independently on the benefits of spend analysis to both Finance and Procurement.

• Spend360 Screenshots
• Spend360 summary
• Spend360 in the public sector

Analyst Reports

• Aberdeen Group Spend Analysis - Pulling back the cover on saving
• Aberdeen Group - The CPO agenda 2009
• Aberdeen Group - Spend Analysis Working too hard for the money
• Aberdeen Group - Spend Intelligence Benchmark
• 2009 Aberdeen Group Report for Spend Analysis
• Capgemini - Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey
• Strategic Sourcing - A critical component of Merger and Acquisition Synergies

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