Getting The Most Out Of A Source-To-Pay Solution For Purchasing Spend Analysis
Purchasing Spend Analysis
In todays corporate climate, gaining complete visibility over all aspects of your organisation?s expenditure is essential for the success of any business. With the complexities of enterprise-level purchasing, robust spend analysis and control is increasingly becoming priority for many executives. Such an undertaking can undoubtedly be an arduous task without the aid of reliable source-to-pay solution.
A source-to-pay solution is designed to manage companies entire process of procurement. From initiating and approving purchasing documents, as well as executing supplier contract management, all the way to managing your entire payment process?source-to-pay solutions offer complete suite of controls and analytics to not only boost companies efficiency, but also that of the entire supply chain.
This guide seeks to offer insights into how executives in the finance department can best and most efficiently harness the power of source-to-pay solutions to ensure that their organisation?s purchasing spend is being accurately and transparently tracked and analysed.
Step 1: Understand Sources of Spend
To best understand where your organisation?s purchasing spend is being allocated, you should first to break down your organisation?s stakeholders into distinct segments and develop corresponding categories for each section. This way, you gain better overview of where exactly the money is being spent and how the different departments? budgets affect each other.
Step 2: Map Out Vendor Data
By utilising source-to-pay solution, you can access data from your vendors to track not only who is providing goods and services for your organisation, but also what negotiated terms have been set for each vendor. This can, in turn, be an invaluable source of information to assess purchasing efficiency and to identify areas of opportunity to further reduce expenses.
Step 3: Identify Insights and Opportunities
Once you have collected, mapped and organised all of your vendor data, you can begin to analyse and assess each area of purchasing spend to determine where potential savings can be achieved. Most source-to-pay solutions feature specialised dashboards that can be further customised to generate more specific insights.
Step 4: Optimise Your Supplier Network
More efficient purchasing can often be achieved simply by better managing and optimising your supplier network. Thanks to the data collected and available through source-to-pay solution, it is easy to identify business partners who are not delivering the desired services or the expected value, and to seek out alternatives with better performance.
Step 5: Improve and Automate Processes
Another way to improve purchasing efficiency is to automate the entire process with source-to-pay solution; creating and managing purchase orders, invoices and payments can all be done online and in an automated manner. This can save considerable amount of time and reduce errors, especially when dealing with multiple vendors at once.
Conclusion
Effective purchasing spend analysis can be the difference between financial security and losses for many organisations. With source-to-pay solution, executives can availed of powerful automation and analytics tools to dramatically reduce expenditures and to gain greater control over an organisation?s budget allocation. By following the steps outlined above, sourced from one of the top source-to-pay solutions, executives can quickly gain greater insights into where corporate money is being spent and how to better manage their organisation?s purchasing in the future.
