E-Sourcing Forum » Beam-Up More Data Scotty! I Need More Spend Visibility!

Beam-Up More Data Scotty! I Need More Spend Visibility!

February 25th, 2010 at 09:39am David Bush - Iasta

One of the big cost and “choke” points in Spend Analysis has been the difficulty in collecting the many different sources of Spend related data. Spend data typically resides in disparate systems, including ERP, AP, PO, Pcard, Suppliers, Supplier enrichment, Expenses, Invoices, Freight Bills, financial systems, sales systems, and more. Spend data can also be spread across many different company locations and systems, as well as available only in foreign languages, thereby making “all” Spend data very difficult to collect. Comprehensive Spend data is needed to achieve more in-depth Spend visibility and to uncover larger cost savings for the company. Typically in the past, vendors required companies to format the data, so it could be put into a fixed database, so it could be rendered to fixed reporting and analytics capabilities. Now that has all changed.

No, data cannot be collected in 10-15 seconds, aka Star Trek “Transporter” capabilities. But today’s data collection capabilities are not far off either. With newer data management applications having underlying dynamic database “data driven” technologies applied, company data can now be collected, audited, and cleansed easily, and in a short amount of time (in hours, vs. days and weeks). All that is needed is a header row defining the file’s data fields, a related template defined, and data validation and integration points applied. This is now done within the vendor data management system, so no IT burden is placed on the organization, except to forward month-end or year-end Spend related files as appropriate, which is an easy thing to do. No more data extraction templates forcing IT people to do field mapping and hard-code their own fields to fields that are predetermined. No data formatting to prescribed translation maps finding places for extraneous or custom data within a fixed database. Simply forward a Spend-related file to a vendor FTP site, and they take it from there.

This new data collection capability may be hard to initially comprehend, but now you can enjoy the ability to easily collect more expansive Spend related data, and drive new analysis and management capabilities. The more complex your organizational disparate data is, the more that “data driven” capabilities apply.

The available selection choices are not truly relevant to new “data driven” Spend Analysis applications. Dynamic database technology saves IT departments’ hours, if not days and weeks of work, and shortens the time to deployment or refresh. Essentially, translation maps are obsolete and a rigid element of the past.

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Entry Filed under: Functionality, General, Spend Analysis

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