The Importance of Spend Analysis for Businesses

Spend analysis is a strategic method or technique that businesses adopt to achieve their objectives. It provides fact-based recommendations for effective and efficient procurement management while promoting a strong, long-term relationship with suppliers and vendors. This article explores how spend analysis can be important for businesses and highlights how a business can benefit from it.

What Is Spend Analysis?

Spend analysis can be described as a business practice that involves assessing, reviewing, and analyzing a business’s procurement data and associated operations (such as supply chains or suppliers). This practice helps a company generate useful reports that can devise different ways to reduce operational and procurement costs and make strategic decisions aligned with its goals and objectives. Spend analysis brings clarity and transparency to a company’s procurement patterns and can have a positive impact on supply chain management, financial management, and payment processing. 

Spend analytics is usually a repetitive method to which a business may have to assign a team within the procurement department who is responsible for the append analytics.

The officials performing spend analysis collect spend data from all departments and units of an organization, clean, format, and process it for useful results to get actionable insights. 

How is spending analysis important for businesses?

Spend analysis can  be important for businesses in the following ways:

• Pointing out cost-reducing opportunities

An effective spend analysis can help a business point out cost-reducing opportunities through which it can significantly reduce operational costs. Through effective procurement management, a business can figure out areas where the cost can be lowered by taking even minor steps. 

• Effective supply chain risk management

Spend analysis can play a vital role in the mitigation of supply chain risks by pointing out inefficiencies and potential errors in the processes and operations. For example, the data and insights obtained from spend analysis can help you mitigate inventory issues, such as running out of stock or over-procurement of specific supplies. The spend analysis guides you to organize your supply efficiently and helps you establish an automatic supply reordering system. 

• Brings financial transparency into your business affairs

Spend analytics gives you a clear idea of how much you spend on the supplies and how your suppliers serve you. It also offers recommendations to optimize your spending and help you save money. For example, suppose different departments of your business have separate contracts with the suppliers for the same service or product. In that case, a thorough spending analysis can help you figure it out and merge these contracts to reduce spending. 

• Empower Your business to get more value from suppliers

Data and insights from spend analysis can help you figure out at what rate you are getting supplies from your suppliers or vendors and if there is a more affordable option available in the market. It also enables you to analyze the lead time a supplier takes to serve you.

How is the spend analysis done?

Spend analysis is of two types: Direct and Indirect. Direct analysis deals with supply management. On the other hand, indirect analysis deals with other procurements and expenditures of a business. Usually, a typical spend analysis involves the following steps:

1. Sourcing and collection of spending data
2. Data cleaning
3. Categorization and storage of data
4. Analysis of data
5. Report generation
6. Recommendations and implementations

Conclusion

Spend analysis can undoubtedly be a useful method to boost your financial and inventory management with a lot of benefits for your business. You can create a specialized department of spend analysis in your business. You can also trust Procurement Plus’s Spend Analysis Services as it’s the most affordable option for you. Procurement Plus offers “full-service” spend analytics to help you analyze where your money is going and how you can save and manage it more efficiently.