What Problem Do You Solve With Spend Analysis?
We were recently featured by the Illinois Technology Association in their Spotlight Series of member companies. As we pondered the answers to their interview questions, what became obvious was that their audience would not be our typical audience of CPOs and CFOs and we would need to take a step back to explain who we are and what we do. When people outside of our industry ask me where I work, I’ve had a few responses of “Oh, do you sell radars?”, but mostly the responses have been “Huh?” For people who are not familiar with corporate spend management I usually follow up with, “Supply chain management, sourcing, budgeting, procurement, spend, that kind of thing” and that seems to help them to understand, but with a written answer to an interview question, that wasn’t going to work. So here is how we responded when asked, “What problem do you solve?”
Every company starts out small, and when you’re a small company, it’s easy to keep track of every dollar you spend. And you’re very careful with every dollar you spend. You hire your first employee, rent your first office space, set up your first phone system. This is easy to manage and track. As your company grows, your spend grows. More employees, more office supplies, more travel, more office rent. You’re putting exponentially more and more money into your business and your product. Marketing and research, advertising, legal. Perhaps you expand internationally or you acquire a few other companies. At this point, you’re
not tracking every dollar you spend. Your spend has taken on a life of its own and in many ways, you’ve lost control. You started out with a handful of suppliers, many of whom you met personally. Now your suppliers number in the thousands. Initially you tracked your spend under a dozen categories, now your spend is classified to hundreds of categories. With international operations, you’re working with spend data in different languages and different currencies. The latest company that you acquired used Excel spreadsheets to track their spend. The acquisition before that had serious miscalculations with their spend. This is not just inefficient, it’s affecting your bottom line. How do you manage all of this disparate data?
That’s where we come in. Regardless of the spend-data format, regardless of the currency, regardless of the language, regardless of the misspellings, we collect all of your spend and spend-related data, clean it up, classify it in a way that makes sense to everyone, and then give you the ability to track, measure, and manage your spend at a very detailed level. This results in smarter purchasing decisions and signifcant ongoing savings to the company.
Do you think that explains spend analysis and spend management to someone outside of our space?
Joy McCaffrey, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Spend Radar