Procurement reporting and analytics

To further strengthen and develop your procurement function, insights into the relevant data are needed to find the specific pain points and improvement areas. Finding those insights is easier said than done, as it often requires advanced analysis to find them. Moreover, the insights often have to be in the interest of the corporate management as well and not only in the interest of the procurement function. This requires alignment of the top prioritised KPIs between the corporate management and the procurement function.

Some of the most common pitfalls we typically see in this regard are:

• Not being aligned between what the corporate management and the procurement function deem as the most important goals and ambitions and how these are measured (KPIs).
• Focusing on too many improvement areas at once, not considering each initiative’s priority and value. This leads to a long and inefficient implementation, where a lot of time and energy is spent before any value improvement occurs. This again leads to disappointment for all stakeholders involved.
• Not being able to access, find or structure the correct data linked to the KPIs.
• The reporting insights gathered do not lead to any action, as they are not specific enough or it is not possible to establish a trend line, based on too little data.

Through our previous projects, we have gathered vast amounts of experience to be able to solve these challenges and guide your procurement team through safe and sound, avoiding all the common (and uncommon!) pitfalls. Some of the activities we would assist with in a reporting and analytics project are a spend analysis, assessing your current data and collecting additional data, if need be. The analysis will segregate, normalise and categorise your spending data, thus providing a baseline to identify potential areas of improvement. The extracted data should fit to you and your management’s reporting needs, ensuring that the reporting insights will also lead to actionable initiatives.

Our strong set of tools and enablers along with our proven track record allow us to design your reporting insights and assess whether these can be further improved by utilising robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI). Depending on your current IT portfolio, these tools might already be available to you and ready-at-hand. By combining the IT systems available to you and our knowledge of best practice reporting designs and master data governance models, we can help you design and guide you through your implementation of the highest reporting standards.