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Organizations are spending on indirect and direct materials, travel & expense, and external workforce. When these components come together, they can get total control of each spend category. The Intelligent Spend Management initiative can bring together the best in the areas of finance, sourcing, and procurement.

We believe following 4 aspects characterize the necessity of the intelligent spend management – the “why”.


Know Your Suppliers

During normal times, the tendency is to manage relationships with key suppliers. Global pandemic taught us that is not sufficient. Great experience drives high mindshare in your supplier. High mindshare pays off when the supply is limited, and CEO of the supplier need to make a judgment call.
75% of Consumer Products organizations consider it important to monitor the entire supply network in real time to sense and assess potential supply disruption risk before it occurs, but only 20% are able to do so - SAP Performance Benchmarks

The ability to survey all your suppliers at scale and drawing rapid insights out of that subjective feedback at all times (normal or crisis) is key for delivery of great supplier experience. 

Supply-Chain Resilience

Companies are not new to supply disruption – there have been many instances of earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and geopolitical tensions like trade wars. Still, COVID-19 was a wake-up call that supply chain resilience and transparency was not enough.
58% lower Revenue Loss Due to Stock-outs for organizations which have shorter Supply Re-plan Cycle Time- SAP Performance Benchmarks

The rapid emergence of shared data platforms, collaboration tools, digital tools (such as digital signature management and new technologies) provide necessary foundation to build a reliable, resilient, and agile network of suppliers.

P2P Process Intelligence

For enterprise of any size, business transformation is imperative, and they need to know what’s holding them back.P2P process improvement can lead to significant value addition and pave the way for other departments.
63% of organizations consider it important to shrink cycle times and reduce buffers embedded in systems with real-time capabilities, but only 20% are able to do so – SAP Performance Benchmarks

Process mining augmented with analytics and machine learning can enable companies to quickly investigate, benchmark, improve and transform business processes to respond to support new capabilities.

Digitalization

Business leadership expects procurement to master digital technologies and provide better service without increasing the cost of procurement.
74% of organizations consider it important to engage the CEO and Board as executive sponsors of digital innovation, thereby ensuring it is on the management agenda and reflects a customer-focused vision, but only 42% are able to do so - SAP Performance Benchmarks

Using SAP's Business Technology Platform, customers can achieve agility, business value, and continual innovation through integration, data to value, and extensibility of all SAP and third-party applications and data assets.

Let me end this blog with some key insights from Agile Procurement Insights Research by SAP in collaboration with Oxford Economics Reference Link

  • Nearly 4 in 10 (38%) executives say that most /all their procurement processes are manual.

  • Only about half (54%) of executives say their procurement technologies enable them to make data-driven decisions about spend across the organization.

  • Only half (50%) of executives can quickly find alternative sources of supply when needed.

  • Only 1 in 3 can track and manage SOW to PO to invoicing for projects done by services providers.


Managing the spend is the key. However, Managing the spend “intelligently” will make the difference!

P.S.

If you are interested, you can read the entire source to pay value paper at one go here.

You may also wish to learn how our vision to value methodology links your vision for the future and SAP technology innovations to tangible business outcomes.