Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

"This is too much, I have to cut down my expenses on Clothes, Shoes, and Watches" - shouted my colleague suddenly in office, looking at his laptop screen. What happened? Everybody started staring at him - as he is known for flamboyance, in which apparels surely plays a part. The screen he was looking at was his bank website displaying his credit card "spend analyzer" tab. The graph showed that the total amount he spend in last one year on his credit card - 50% of it went to apparel and that's the reason of all this noise. So "Spend Analysis" reached home finally and its hitting everybody's eyes (or wallets). Till recently only billion - million dollars companies are privy of using buzzwords like spend analysis, identify potential savings and catch low hanging fruits etc. As world is through deep down recession, the world sees need to save those pennies for another dooms day. But where do you find all that money? So the spend analysis of your expe

Horses for Sources - a IT industry analyst focussed on oursourcing published a very good article today after Mahindra Satyam's analyst call. Good assessment on how the things are after the Satyam takeover of Mahindras and what needs to be done - the main point being Mahindra Saryam needs to be distinctive. http://www.horsesforsources.com/event-alert-mahindra-satyam-130610 Thanks Prashant Mendki pmendki(at)gmail(dot)com

For last two months I was talking to some customers and prospective customers to study on "how" part of Spend Analytics system. This How is mainly about - How do you use spend analytics system - simple. My impression untill recently that everybody must be looking at reports like - Vendor wise spend, Commodity wise spend, Category wide spend etc etc, then identify what are important objects in terms of money - get the strategy defined to do negotiations and then actually saving money in longer term using negotiated pricing. Now after my brief 2 months study - this looks to be a small part of the world to me. Sometimes this is "Not" the part of results through spend analytics system. Then what do industry do with it? Interestingly sometime people just needs a consolidated analytical system. Means, they have desperate systems all over the world, and data in those is not in good shape. So what they want is some system to consolidate, standardize the data, cleanse it a

A good read in recent issue of Risk Management Magazine - an Article on Spend Analysis and Supplier Risk titled "Domino Effect". http://www.rmmagazine.com/MGTemplate.cfm?Section=RMMagazine&NavMenuID=128&template=/Magazine/DisplayMagazines.cfm&IssueID=344&AID=4072&Volume=57&ShowArticle=1 Thanks prashant Mendki (pmendki at gmail dot com)

Imagine for a second that you are a global enterprise with more than 10 finance systems located at different locations worldwide. Do you know, how many opportunities are you missing in double payments, missed volume discounts, off-contract spend, who are your real suppliers at Tier 2, even if you have preferred suppliers at Tier 1? Do you know your largest spend categories? Do you know which corporate house you are doing most business with and parent of the vendors that you deal with named as A, B & C are actuall same? Which suppliers are diversity suppliers – woman owned or minority owned? This is the type of information that you can expect to become visible and get some actionable input from it to increase your savings from a spend analysis project. Now ways and means to implement those spend analysis program can be different for everybody depending on system spread, geographic locations, nature of business and business priorities. There are multiple vendors and consultants ava

If you are a player in the Supply Chain industry - a manager, a business analyst, a leader in manufacturing, a strategic sourcing consultant or a spend analyst, a business intelligence technician or a supply chain guy - if you haven't read the book by Kirit Pandit and H Marmanis titled "Spend Analysis - The Winodow to Startegic Sourcing"- you are missing something. This book details everything that you need to know on Spend Analysis. It details out right from simple definitions to the steps on implementing Spend Management program, how different classification taxonomies work, what all reports one needs to look for, how to identify opportunities and what are different components of Spend analysis that makes it "real" on technology side. So it helps you to understand whether you need spend  analysis - what it means, if you say yes - what all things you may want to look for to decide your own goal and then once you know goals how to make those real - in simple l

A good Article by industry analyst - Jason Buch on SAP Spend management solution - SAP Spend Performance Management: Supply Risk Meets Spend Analysis Posted At : March 30, 2010 11:10 AM Posted By : Editor Related Categories: Jason Busch, Spend Management For years, SAP and Oracle largely punted on the spend analysis area, providing a large opportunity for other vendors to gain a foothold inside companies in a critical Spend Management area. In the past two quarters, however, both SAP and Oracle have gotten serious about releasing entirely new spend analysis tools that acknowledge the need for looking beyond just ERP systems data and dumping raw information into a data warehouse. SAP in particular has moved past solving basic multi-system and source spend data challenges, which they now accomplish through a combination of SAP extractors for ECC and SRM as well as a data integration ETL capability for non-SAP systems, not to mention support for integrating third-party data feed

More and more I study the vendors and their spend analysis solutions, methodologies in this big big market place of procurement spend, strategic sourcing and related areas, I wonder if there is more gap between "product" and "solutions". Everybody is trying to jump and say "here is more automated solution", "if you can do it in 10 hrs - here I am with 6 hrs", "If you get it for 100 $, here I am with 80$" and likewise on all other comparable factors. Yes, the market is competitive and customers are well educated - so marketing yourself well, providing fastest turnaround and proposing competitive pricing is required and much needed in crowded market. But thats for the short term I guess. In longer term - more and more customer education is required to make them aware of Solution rather than a product. Now, whats the difference? Is anybody working with customers in identifying their organizational spend analysis goals -  short term, mid

In his first ever article in 2010 on his blog spendmatters, titled Wish you Happy New Year 2009 , Jason Buch started it with a question - "Wouldn't you like to forget 2009? " As an industry observer and analyst I will say NO. Not lot many of you agree with me I know, as it was an upside down for many of us. But lets think - in which decade there was no such situation in one or the other front somewhere ? So this is a phenomenon continues. Whether that affects individual life or not - that person will see it as a good or bad. Now being in the big economy was bound to affect sometime - which it did. Just like a tsunami devastated many, a year prior to that. Now lets look at what happened good in 2009 - the first and foremost - overall manufacturing, support, logistics, supply chain and IT and hundreds of ancillary sector went through a matuarity curve. The things that were irrelevant or not so critical in the chain started vanishing. Everything now is being attached wit

Hello, Wish you all and your Family Very Very Happy New Year 2010. May all your dreams come true and life filled with Happiness this year. I am sure this year is going to be a wonderfully hectic on work front. Now sometimes yes hectic is not so wonderful, but most of the times I enjoy it. We all know that the analytics industry is all buzzing and getting matured after long learning curve. Till 2 years back, supply chain analytics or spend analysis was game of more nische players whereas big guns looking at it as "something that we dont have to do", "its not our thing" attitude. Big ERP players was more into application integrated with their systems and data management activities was always service delivery thing with speciality companies doing good like - Ariba, Zycus, Emptoris, Bravo to name few. Now 2008 and 2009 saw sudden changes in that landscape. As economy was fragile and people started looking at optimization as the solution, everybody including big ERP pl