SAS^® Spend Analysis

Though most procurement organizations are evaluated by their ability to continually reduce total enterprise spend, traditional procurement software systems tend to offer only initial savings that quickly dry up – leaving procurement executives struggling to meet financial goals from year to year.

In the Spotlight Best Practices in Spending Analysis: Cure for a Corporate Epidemic This report by Aberdeen Group examines spend data management success strategies and profiles enterprises demonstrating best practices in spending analysis supported by spend data management automation and/or services.

Difficulties reducing procurement spend can often be traced to a lack of visibility across suppliers and commodities. A number of factors contribute to this lack of visibility, including data quality and data accessibility. Commodities are often not classified according to industry standards, so data quality suffers. And as organizations generate more and more information through disparate systems, data volumes have become too large for many companies to aggregate across the entire enterprise.

As a procurement executive, failure to understand when, why, how much and with whom your company spends its money will result in missed opportunities to reduce cost and increase your bottom line. What's more, traditional approaches for ranking suppliers leave much to be desired, since they often rely on too many subjective measures, guesswork and incomplete information.

Because of these and other factors, procurement organizations are often unable to leverage corporate buying power for improved contracts, ensure compliance with existing contracts or reduce maverick spending across the enterprise.

Reduce enterprise spend through improved procurement visibility
SAS Spend Analysis helps you reduce enterprise spend across suppliers and commodities through increased visibility into procurement information. You can leverage corporate buying power for improved cost savings and determine how to buy more effectively and efficiently from valued suppliers.

This strategic solution lets you identify not only from whom you are buying, but what you are purchasing from each supplier, when these items were purchased, and how they were purchased. Able to pull any quantity of data from any existing systems, SAS Spend Analysis can identify key commodities from different suppliers and help prioritize your strategic sourcing efforts.

Rank suppliers for improved relationships
Through a process of weighted supplier ranking that uses the criteria most important to you, SAS also helps you reduce total spend and supplier risk. With SAS, you can determine which suppliers are best suited for your company's needs.

SAS Spend Analysis includes an application for dynamic weighting, which adds balance and flexibility to the process of evaluating suppliers, since the influence of each evaluation criterion can be adjusted dynamically, unlike the fixed weights used in a traditional weighted averages approach.

Among other features, SAS Spend Analysis:

• Allows users to customize their view of spend information, so the most appropriate data is always available for decision making.
• Pulls data from all procurement systems throughout the enterprise.
• Is designed with the scalability to support complex global environments and large volumes of data.
• Combines with SAS Sourcing Strategy to offer optimized recommendations for how to best meet your sourcing goals.
• Provides best practice reports for identifying cost-saving opportunities, as well as web-based, ad hoc querying capabilities to support custom reporting.

SAS Spend Analysis is a component of the SAS Supplier Relationship Management suite, a comprehensive, integrated set of data management and analytic applications that help procurement departments gain a better understanding of their purchases, suppliers and performance in order to make better strategic sourcing decisions.