Category Archives: Procurement
Procurement Analytics Use Cases Examples
Last updated: 26th Nov, 2023 The procurement analytics applications is seeing tremendous growth in last few years. With so much data available, advancement in data analytics and related technology field, and the need for digital transformation across procurement organizations, it’s important to know how procurement analytics can help you make better business decisions. This blog will cover procurement analytics and key use cases examples from advanced analytics field such as machine learning, AI, generative AI that will be useful for business stakeholders such as category managers, sourcing managers, supplier relationship managers, business analysts/product managers, and data scientists to implement different use cases using machine learning. The use cases around data-driven decision …
Contract Analysis & Review Checklist: Questions, Examples
Have you ever found yourself knee-deep in contractual jargon, wondering if you’ve missed a critical clause that could cost your organization thousands or even millions? How confident are you that every contract your team signs is optimized for both performance and cost efficiency? If you’re a procurement stakeholder, a category manager, or a contract specialist, these questions are not just hypothetical—they’re the daily challenges you face. In this blog, you will learn about a structured approach to learning, understanding, and reviewing contracts, minimizing risks, and maximizing value based on asking the right kind of questions. We delve into key questions you should be asking, highlight essential clauses to scrutinize, and …
ESG Concepts: Reports, Metrics & KPIs
This blog post is geared toward Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) professionals looking to understand different aspects of ESG and some metrics that can be reported via ESG reports as part of their organization’s ESG reporting (annual reports) in relation to representing the sustainability aspect of their business. An understanding of different aspects of ESG can help you in getting started with ESG initiatives and ESG reporting. ESG initiatives can help companies improve their overall sustainability factor while creating a positive impact on environmental, social, and governance issues. Getting started with ESG-related practices in your organization or department (such as procurement) requires a set of ESG initiatives and related performance …
Spend Analytics Use Cases: AI & Data Science
In this post, you will learn about the high-level concepts of spend analytics in relation to procurement and how data science / machine learning & AI can be used to extract actionable insights as part of spend analytics. This will be useful for procurement professionals such as category managers, sourcing managers, and procurement analytics stakeholders looking to understand the concepts of spend analytics and how they can drive decisions based on spend analytics. What is Spend Analytics? Simply speaking, spend analytics is about performing systematic computational analysis to extract actionable insights from spend and savings data across different categories of spends in order to achieve desired business outcomes such as cost savings, …
Tail Spend Management & Spend Analytics
Do you know where your business is spending its money? And more importantly, do you know where your business SHOULD be spending its money? Many businesses don’t have a good handle on their tail spend – the money that’s spent on things that are not essential to the core operations of the company. Tail spend can be difficult to track and manage, but with the help of spend analytics tools and machine learning, it’s becoming easier than ever before. In this blog post, we’ll discuss what tail spend is, how to track it, and how to use analytics and machine learning to make better decisions about where to allocate your …
Supplier Relationship Management & Machine Learning / AI
Supplier relationship management (SRM) is the process of managing supplier relationships to develop and maintain a strategic procurement partnership. SRM includes focus areas such as supplier selection, procurement strategy development, procurement negotiation, and performance measurement and improvement. SRM has been around for over 20 years but we are now seeing new technologies such as machine learning come into play. What exactly does advanced analytics such as artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) have to do with SRM? And how will AI/ML technologies transform procurement? What are some real-world machine learning use cases related to supplier relationships management? What are a few SRM KPIs/metrics which can be tracked by leveraging …
Procure-to-pay Processes & Machine Learning
The procure-to-pay (P2P) cycle or process consists of a set of steps that must be taken in order for an organization to procure and pay for goods and services. Procurement is the process by which organizations purchase goods, supplies, equipment, or services from outside sources. The procurement function may also serve as an intermediary between two internal departments or divisions that have overlapping needs. In this blog post, we will discuss how AI / machine learning can be leveraged to automate certain procure-to-pay processes such that procure-to-pay teams can focus on core business goals. What is the procure-to-pay cycle or process? The procure-to-pay (P2P) cycle or process is defined as …
Supplier risk management & machine learning techniques
Supplier risk management (SRM) is a serious issue for procurement professionals. Suppliers can be unreliable, have poor quality products, or fail to meet specifications. In this blog post we will discuss AI / machine learning algorithms / techniques that you can use to manage supplier risk and make your procurement process more efficient. What is supplier risk management? Supplier Risk Management (SRM) also known as Supplier Risk Optimization (SRO), refers to policies and technology that enables organizations to manage risks related with suppliers. This can be done by analyzing data about past purchases from the supplier, predicting future risks related with purchases from this particular company. It’s crucial for procurement …
Spend Analytics – 5 Ws of Spend Analysis
In this post, you will learn about 5 Ws of spend analytics. In case you are a procurement professional looking to understand use cases related to spend analytics, you may find this post to be very useful. In simple words, spend analytics is about extracting insights from spend in different procurement categories. What are we spending on? First and foremost, it is important to get visibility on what items are we spending on. This can be achieved using a dashboard. This form of analytics is also called descriptive analytics. Analyzing item spends can be termed as Item spend analytics. The items can be related to direct or indirect procurement. Indirect …
I found it very helpful. However the differences are not too understandable for me