Some organizations spend as much as 60 percent of revenue to acquire the goods and services necessary to operate. Given this figure, it is hardly surprising that procurement professionals are feeling pressure to cut spending. But how is it possible to reduce supplier spend while simultaneously improving supplier relations and collaboration?

The answer is a strategic sourcing system that provides the information to let procurement departments in educational institutions:

• Create complete spend transparency.
• Develop a comprehensive, accurate profile of the supplier base.
• Identify opportunities for optimal sourcing of materials, equipment and services.
• Consolidate and prioritize suppliers based on quality, performance and on-time delivery.
• Ensure contract compliance and reduce maverick spending.
• Ensure the quality of purchased items.
• Ensure appropriate levels of supply.

SAS Supplier Relationship Management
With SAS Supplier Relationship Management, procurement professionals can gain a better understanding of their purchases, suppliers and performance in order to make better strategic sourcing decisions. Using this comprehensive solution, educational institutions can reduce enterprise spend, consolidate and prioritize suppliers, reduce supplier risk and align procurement strategies with strategic goals.

SAS delivers supplier intelligence through an integrated set of data management and analytic applications that work with existing operational data and systems to gather, analyze and leverage all aspects of supplier data and purchasing history, thereby optimizing strategic sourcing and achieving significant cost savings.

Consisting of four fully integrated components, SAS Supplier Relationship Management allows you to maintain the flexibility you need to focus on your greatest pain today and then expand into other areas of improvement:

• SAS Sourcing Data Quality provides accurate, detailed, comprehensive information to help you reduce commodity spend without increasing risk. SAS uses repeatable, automated coding based on industry standards and can readily accept any classification system. Normalize your supplier information for more accurate measurement. Leverage third-party information for supplier enrichment, and ensure your suppliers are accurately and consistently named.
• SAS Spend Analysis helps you reduce enterprise spend across suppliers and commodities by increasing the visibility of procurement information. With it, you can leverage institutional buying power for cost-savings and identify ways to buy more effectively from valued suppliers. SAS Spend Analysis also lets you perform weighted supplier ranking using the criteria most important to you, helping you evaluate which suppliers are best suited to serving your institution’s needs.
• SAS Procurement Scorecard helps you set, measure and manage procurement strategies that are aligned with goals based on information from all of the procurement systems throughout your institution. You can create and maintain scorecards for individual suppliers and the entire procurement organization, measuring performance against procurement-specific KPIs. These capabilities help you reduce total spend and supplier risk as well as ensure supplier quality, on-time delivery and performance.
• SAS Sourcing Strategy uses operations research techniques to add balance and flexibility to the supplier evaluation process. It employs user-defined business rules to narrow your list of suppliers and recommend how much to spend with each one to achieve your procurement goals most effectively.