How to ensure you are managing your spend well
One of the components of vendor management program that is often either overlooked, or over killed with a system that provides lots of complex data to help you “manage” your spend, is spend analysis. For many companies the trick to managing their spend (their colleagues buying behavior) and their vendors performance is to simply look at the data and patterns that are readily available to them and make decisions that will help them with analyzing their spend.
A good vendor management system should be able to marry data coming from both the procurement and purchasing functions as well as transactional data from their accounts payable (AP) operations. By collecting and organizing this readily available data, stakeholders can see patterns, rouge spend, and savings opportunities and make decisions in real time.
Managing your spend is not that complicated for most companies who have relatively straight forward supply chains and procurement requirements. The data tells the story, just make sure your vendor management solution is is presenting that story to you. Large enterprise spend management systems may be a solution for some but for most just analyzing the data and making decisions is all you need to streamline your spend and eliminate or greatly reduce rogue spending in your organization. Procurement and finance can work together to keep your companies spend under control!
ICG’s cloud hosted vendor portal solutions can help you achieve those goals. Contact ICG Consulting today for more information or a demo of ICG’s vendor management suite of solutions. You can also watch a short video on all of ICG’s back-office solutions.