Spend analysis as a building block for an effective strategic procurement

The Why

In today’s world whether we like it or not data is influencing and controlling our decisions in the majority of aspects. Procurement is no exception, and having an overview of the spend is nowadays more crucial than any other time. The spend overview entails multiple internal and external dimensions such as market intelligence, risk, compliance, or performance indicators. Creating this spend overview starts with internal spend data and a solid analysis of the data. Spend analysis is the fundamental building block for strategic spend management. That’s why having a strong capability in this area is a must-have, especially if your organization has certain levels of complexity (e.g., high amount of merger and acquisition model, multiple ERP systems).

The What

Great spend analysis should be able to accurately and in a timely manner reflect on the types of products/services and their relevance classification, their providers (suppliers), and customers (internal BU’s). The timeliness of this analysis, often neglected by procurement organizations, impacts the agility of the organization for decision making and moving forward. Moreover, classification accuracy, another overlooked aspect, impacts the trustworthiness of the analysis.
When you extract information from different sources (e.g., different ERPs), almost every setting needs to be cleansed, enriched, and reviewed. However, dealing with high volumes of data in a limited amount of time is no human competency. Manual processes often result in very long (in order of quarters or even years), errors and mistakes in the outcome. Timeliness and accuracy have turned into a chicken and egg problem; and turned many initiatives dry since teams have been asked something which maybe machines are only designed to perform – cleans, enrich and consolidate millions of data in a rather short cycle time.

The How

As we have been on the other side of the table and experienced the current challenges, we have designed Mithra AI to be the no hustle helper for spend analysis. A service that your teams can fully rely on and support them to be the focus on most value add activities (strategic and execution instead of calculation and reporting). Our solution is ready to use from day 1 and only asking for your data in excel format (we know over 52% of organizations are run by excel today and remaining heavily dependent on). With Mithra AI, you can review potential opportunities across your scope in a matter of hours and classify your data using your own taxonomy with our own developed AI technology to achieve that great spend analysis capability without making your team sweat.