Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

 Original Blog post - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/journey-procurement-transformation-begins-part-ii-prashant-mendki Procurement transformation journey is complex, cross functional, time consuming and even frustrating at times. The very basic but a strategic step to start this journey is “Spend Analysis”. Again – this has to be done in a right way to get the potential benefits. We talked about that in first part of this article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/journey-procurement-transformation-begins-part-i-prashant-mendki By definition – Spend Analysis is an analysis of your spend (invoice paid), what items you are spending on (product), who you are paying to (supplier). It looks really simple – no? When I worked with one of the large Media Entertainment company few years back, they had thousands of suppliers, millions of transactions, good amount of Maverick spend. It’s a global business with more than $2Bn in Spend, 12 different global systems. Thousands of trans...

Hello Everybody. I was missing the action on this blog since around 4 months now. Actually I was too busy with new data management engagement in my new role. As its a vacation season, its time to gather thoughts and share it..... Hope I will continue... As the title of this blog says "its a time to look at your data, spend data". YES, as everybody is hard pressed for cash in the difficult time like this - where to look for it? I have one answer - Look at your own transactions to see if you can save some there. Lets check what are you spending on, categorise your spend well.Check if you know where you can negotiate with your vendors and go for it. You will amaze to see how you have ignored this point in the past and how much you can save by doing this. My experience tells me that you can get benefit of atleast 5 to 7 % of savings by doing this activity. Wondering how - Keep reading .... Lets make it simple. You have repository of suppliers, and lots of transactions for those s...

SO yes now you know that you need to have data in correct shape - but how to start all the juggernaut? I will tell you - this is a step by step process. So you need to identify your needs first. How to do that ? Profile your data using simple queries on database server like MS SQL server, Oracle etc. There are sophisticated tools available in the market who can profile data for you. What does this profiling meant to you - it analyze your data and will tell you how much dirty or incosnistent data you have. You may have some null values, date format issues, numeric and character data collision issues, binary data like male, female etc. Now once you know dirtiness of your data atleast you know where you stand. Now the next step is to analyze results and estimate the cleansing efforts. I will tell you that soon. Watch Out.