Spend analysis
Most procurement functions can tell you what they bought. Far fewer can tell you what the organisation spent, with whom, on what terms, and how much of it was never competitively sourced. That gap is where the money sits.
The problem this solves
Spend sits in several systems and none of them agree. Finance has one view from the ledger, procurement has another from the ERP, and the business has corporate cards and no-PO invoices that appear in neither.
Supplier names are inconsistent, so the same vendor appears eleven times and nobody sees the aggregate. Categories are inherited rather than designed, so spend that should be negotiated together is scattered across four owners.
The result is a function making sourcing decisions on partial information, and a CFO who cannot answer how much the organisation spends on a given category.
What we actually do
The steps, in the order we run them.
Collect and reconcile
We pull spend from the ERP, the ledger, card statements and invoice records, then reconcile them against each other so you have one number everyone agrees on before any analysis starts.
Cleanse and normalise
Supplier records are deduplicated and parent-child relationships mapped, so group spend with a vendor is visible rather than split across a dozen trading names.
Classify
Every transaction is mapped to a category taxonomy built for your organisation, not a generic template, so the categories match how you actually buy and who actually owns them.
Find the value
We identify consolidation opportunities, off-contract and maverick spend, price variance for the same item across business units, and categories that have never been competitively sourced.
Rank and plan
Findings become a prioritised pipeline with estimated value, effort and owner, so the next twelve months of sourcing has a running order rather than a wish list.
What you get
- A reconciled spend baseline agreed with finance
- A cleansed supplier master with parent-child hierarchy
- A category taxonomy mapped to your operating model
- A savings pipeline, ranked by value and effort, with named owners
- A dashboard your team maintains after we leave
On engagements where spend has not been analysed in several years we typically find 10 to 25 per cent addressable savings across managed categories, and a supplier base that consolidates by a third without losing a single capability.
Questions we get asked
What data do you need to start?
An ERP or ledger extract covering 12 to 24 months of transactions, supplier master data, and whatever contract register exists. We work with what you have. Imperfect data is normal and cleansing it is part of the engagement, not a prerequisite.
How long does a spend analysis take?
Six to eight weeks for a full baseline across a mid-sized enterprise, less if the data is clean or the scope is a single category group. It usually forms the diagnostic phase of a wider 8 to 12 week procurement advisory engagement.
Do we need to buy analytics software?
No. We deliver the analysis and hand over a dashboard your team can maintain. If you already run a spend analytics platform we work inside it, and if you are evaluating one we will tell you honestly whether your volume justifies it.
What if our supplier data is a mess?
It usually is, and that is a finding rather than an obstacle. Deduplication and parent-child mapping is a standard part of the work. The cleansed supplier master is one of the more durable things you keep afterwards.
Where to start
Run the free procurement maturity diagnostic for a scored view of where the gaps are, or talk to a consultant about this specific problem. Both take less time than a meeting about having a meeting.
Talk to a consultant