Spend Management Services

A spend management strategy is meant to optimize how a company manages its direct and indirect spend, or should be, and involves a process of continuous improvement as new spend data is collected and analyzed. This expense management focuses on controlling the purchasing process, optimizing supplier relationships, and maximizing spend ROI. There are a number of component functions involved in Procurement’s spend management strategy, including supply chain management, supplier management, category management, and inventory management. Also, spend management is often coordinated with other stakeholders, internal and external, such as Finance and Accounts Payable, because of the broad impact it has on budgeting and forecasting, cash flow, savings, and working capital.

Cloud platform-based spend management solution technology is invaluable, if not indispensable, for achieving the goals of your spend management strategy. A robust SaaS technology tool simplifies and automates spend processes, enabling more accurate budgeting. Integrated spend management software gives you real-time visibility into spend data and cash flow, creating a comprehensive snapshot of company spend. Along with spend analysis technology, these tools help you optimize procurement processes and turn intelligence into actionable insights.

Spend management plays a key role in the financial health of an organization. An optimized spend strategy reveals where the money is going so you can improve the purchasing process, mitigate spend risk, and streamline your cash flow. This continuous spend analysis requires visibility and transparency across organizational spend. Real-time data and analytics create a more holistic situational awareness of spend at any given time, empowering better decision making, purchasing insights, and capturing savings opportunities.

Among the many ways Corcentric can assist you in improving your overall spend management approach, the first – and most important – step is to identify all the sources and expenses around your direct and indirect spend. The aforementioned spend management digital technology will make this process much faster, easier, and comprehensive, as it entails collating and analyzing all the elements related to your spend: POs (purchase orders), receipt reports, vendor and supplier invoices, and supplier payment information. With these insights in hand, you will have a leverageable roadmap to reformulating and/or optimizing your approach to spend management.

Since data is one of the most valuable assets your organization has, sifting through all your spend data via spend analysis is going to yield a vast amount of usable insights. An integrated spend analysis tool that provides real-time visibility is going to be the best way to make the most of the information available. By analyzing a complete purchasing history, you will see what your direct and indirect spend sources and patterns are, establish a foundation for supplier performance benchmarks, quantify cost savings, and approach budgeting, forecasting, and reporting with a more holistic view of spend.

To learn more, read our Spend Analysis whitepaper and watch our webinar.

Simply put, spend category management delineates all the different areas of expenses that an organization spends money on. Being able isolate sourcing categories provides maximum benefits in spend management, especially combined with supplier and market data. Segmenting spend into categories of related products empowers Procurement to focus on finding opportunities for spend and supplier consolidation, and maximized savings. Some examples of indirect spend categories include employee insurance and benefits, logistics, MRO, marketing and advertising, utilities, professional services, and the like. Examples of direct spend categories include raw materials, engineered products (PPV & VAVE), contract manufacturing, and more. Categorizing provides better insights into all the spend information collected.

An end-to-end spend management solution and approach enables Corcentric to provide a truly holistic offering. In fact, we’re the only provider that has a technology / advisory / services combination, with tech-enabled spend management experts focused on business outcomes and sustainable performance enhancement. Our one-stop shop capabilities go from expertise in strategic sourcing and spend analysis, to technology and personnel advisory, to platform-based technology solutions for Finance, AP, and Procurement, to experienced managed services focused on supplier relationships and process efficiency.