Last month we told you that if you need to bring the hammer down, [you should] make sure you have an anvil to bring it down on and introduced you to Anvil Analytical, a stand-alone spend analysis technology solution that also includes a Scope-3 Carbon Tracking, a country-based Risk Intelligence, a Market & Inflation Intelligence, and a Project Management (Savings Tracking) module that you can augment the solution with. Spun out of 4C Associates, it’s a good service-oriented augmented spend analytics solution for those companies that need a hybrid service/DiY solution due to lack of manpower or lack of training/skills in spend analysis.

Long time readers will know it’s rare for SI to cover any vendor two months in a row, but a few weeks after the doctor reviewed the solution, Anvil Analytical released a new, completely free, commodity market data offering that will be a huge help to Procurement Pros everywhere. Anytime a vendor offers you real help or insight for free, and not just marketing noise, it’s worth covering.

As part of Anvil Analytical’s new free commodity market data offering, users get access to

• commodity price charts including:
• a historic overview of commodity price trends from numerous global data feeds
• a written overview of the price development story

As of now, the offering includes approximately 90 commodities across

• energy commodities (coal, crude oil, natural gas),
• non-energy commodities (raw materials, agriculture, fertilizers, non-precious metals and minerals), and
• precious metals

With up to twenty four years of data at their disposal (with the monthly data starting in January, 2000), it can be quite informative. It can really be a huge help you in combatting price increases as you know exactly how much a commodity increased. (However, if you don’t know the approximate cost breakdown, it will still be hard to keep the vendor’s prices as low as possible. If you think a material cost is 50%, but it’s only 30%, you’ll still accept a cost increase 60% more than it needs to be, and that ain’t great. So make sure you have a solution that gives you that level of insight if you really want to control costs to the maximum extent possible.)

If you haven’t checked it out yet, and don’t have any commodity data access, the doctor recommends you try Anvil Analytical’s free commodity market data offering. It doesn’t cost you anything, and it will help you evaluate both the extent to which you need commodity and category market intelligence as well as whether or not the Anvil Analytical solution is for you before you actually pay for a solution. Anything that gives you confidence in money you’re about to spend, or not spend, is a good thing.