Today’s guest post is from Brian Seipel, Spend Analysis lead at Source One Management Services focused on helping corporations gain a clear view of their spend data to derive actionable budget optimization strategies.

Yesterday we began our tale of two VARs that have a lot in common. Both serve the same North East region, both offer stellar customer service, and so far the relationship has been good on all sides. Each of your offices comes away satisfied after reviewing their VAR’s track record. But, as we started to discuss yesterday, that’s not all there is to the story. Today we discuss the next two ways spend analytics can change your life … for the better.

Improve Efficiencies

Beyond hard dollar savings, companies stand to save money by building a leaner, more efficient Procurement department. From the benefit described above, we can already see how our total vendor pool will be reduced through consolidation, and fewer vendors to manage means less time devoted to the procurement process. However, we will also learn more about our vendor landscape through the analysis.

Continuing the example above, let’s consider those two VARs a bit more closely. All else equal, we may find out that New York’s VAR offers a vendor-managed inventory program, centralized billing, and an online customer ordering portal. Each of these value-adds will help Procurement be more efficient, even if no hard dollar savings are generated. By properly researching the landscape, we can determine what value-adds are truly important and focus on building up these efficiencies.

Clamp Down on Maverick Spend

So far, we’ve consolidated spend to a single VAR (generating hard dollar savings via negotiated rebates and unit pricing using our newly consolidated spend as leverage) and improved our procurement process (generating soft dollar savings by understanding and implementing best practices).

We haven’t, however, talked about specific items being purchased. As the saying goes, “the devil is in the details,” and the very best supplier relationships can fall prey to maverick spend if employees are left to their own devices.

Consider all of the non-strategic, commodity spend that will pass through our VARs; items like cabling, computer peripherals, office equipment and a whole host of other small purchases are often included in contract pricing lists. But what about an employee who goes off the reservation, and orders off-contract? Your negotiated rates become meaningless. Would the purchase of an off-contract mouse by a single employee that is $5 more expensive break the bank? Likely not – however, this problem can get out of hand quickly if large groups of employees routinely ignore the on-contract equivalents. Analyzing spend and comparing it to negotiated on-contract items allows us to identify the problem and either reign in employee behavior, renegotiate the contract price list, or a combination of both to solve it before it gets out of hand.

Which Camp are you in?

If there’s one thing our tale of two VARs has taught us, it is that “you don’t know what you don’t know.” Neither VAR may look like a poor partner at the outset. However, when you look at the entire picture, room for improvement becomes more obvious (especially if we’re willing to change it up). We simply can’t see that entire picture without performing a spend analysis in the first place.

By performing our spend analysis, we put ourselves in the position of moving between the three-foot and 30,000-foot view quickly, enabling us to look at our spend and supplier relationships from all sides. Only then can we effectively manage our spend.

Thanks, Brian.