Master your greatest challenges in strategic spend management with Spend Control

In many companies, a designated purchasing department is responsible for all purchases. Employees outside of this department are not allowed to make purchases on their own. In large companies or multinational corporations, purchasing is often a local task as well. This makes it extremely difficult for headquarters to get a clear overview of individual activities.

To counter these developments, many companies have implemented centralized strategic purchasing organizations. Within the management team, the Chief Purchasing Officer (CPO) is responsible for all purchases throughout the organization. In order to work effectively, therefore, CPOs require an enterprise reporting tool that supports purchasing activities and decisions as well as presents the results in a clear, easy-to-analyze manner.

Spend Control supports CPOs with a flexible, professional system for spend visibility and management.

Manage your purchasing organization more effectively

Without a common reporting system, most companies often turn to Excel-based solutions. Each month, the local units manually consolidate their data and send it to headquarters. This approach has many disadvantages such as:

• Adding additional stress for employees outside of their everyday responsibilities.
• Bogging down the entire purchasing organization at the start of each month.
• Spending too much time consolidating Excel sheets manually due to the difficulty in creating a common structure.
• Increasing the risk of errors due to manual report processing.
• Needing IT – which is already flooded with work as it is – to create basic analyses.

The largest disadvantages of this method by far, however, are the subjectivity of the data as well as the different methodologies used to create it. All employees make many different decisions when compiling their data into reports, for example, to present themselves as well as their actions in the best-possible light. As a result, CPOs need to evaluate their staff based on numbers that they have compiled themselves – a rather paradox situation. Since the information is hard to compare, it is also more difficult to create benchmarks to other business units.

Spend Control helps you avoid these and other common mistakes. This system tightly integrates with the ERP and accounting systems in your subsidiaries or offices to automatically extract the data without needing manual interventions or manipulating source data.

Identify and leverage potential savings in strategic purchasing

Spend Control helps you identify and leverage potential savings in strategic purchasing. This unique ‘savings mining’ concept combines data mining technologies to help you search your own purchasing data to find the areas where you can save money.

Save 3 - 10% of your external purchasing volume through data transparency

Our vast experience with strategic purchasing projects shows that companies can typically save 3%-10% of their external purchasing volume by simply creating more transparency in their data. On top of that, sourcing initiatives that are supported by this additional transparency can help create an additional 7% savings on average! The diagram below shows the average numbers for the projects we have implemented in the past few years:

CPOs expect dramatic cost savings. Spend Control can help you meet these expectations – for example, through bundling concepts that can lead to new price negotiations or a change in suppliers.

Without transparent data, CPOs cannot adequately organize and execute these tasks. In other words, besides having less bargaining power against their suppliers, CPOs cannot clearly measure actual savings or validate these numbers – or those of their staff – to the management board.

Orpheus Spend Control gives CPOs the tools they need to optimize margin and gain control over spending

Spend Control creates long-lasting data transparency by creating a detailed, common base of data across the enterprise. Since the system automatically categorizes data using a common standard (e.g. eClass or UNSPSC), companies can continuously improve the quality of their data.

The spend cube ensures the integrity and measurability of your data. The system directly extracts the data from your ERP systems. Spend Control takes care of the calculations and reduces the number of manual interfaces to a minimum. Users can check the plausibility of their data and even correct it if necessary. Since the system automatically generates the reports, there is little to no risk of subjective options or manipulated results.

This uniform, standardized categorization creates a common basis for all purchasing data which also helps promote common ‘wording’ across the enterprise. The system collects and processes all data using identical methods.

As a result, you can easily compare all analyses and results throughout your company. This creates a solid foundation for creating long-lasting purchasing decisions that also lead to significant savings.

Spend Control allows you to calculate these savings as well as separately analyze the effects of prices, volumes, raw materials or even currency fluctuations. As a result, all stakeholders in this process can clearly influence, measure and validate the success of these purchasing policies.

Effective reporting tools play a major role in supporting the spend management process. With Spend Control, you can leverage predefined, standard templates or even create your own reports. You can automatically update all of these reports on a regular basis and distribute them to various people in different formats. Spend Control also offers powerful features to help business users create ad hoc queries on their own and without needing technical skills.

What’s more, Spend Control can also help you manage local purchasing processes because business units can see the quality of the master data.

Address the three most important aspects of strategic purchasing with Orpheus Spend Control

Orpheus Spend Control offers custom support to help you reduce costs, manage your purchasing organization and optimize working capital. By fulfilling your basic needs for creating more transparency as well as finding answers to complex strategic questions, the software also helps you create a stronger connection between your purchasing and management accounting departments.

Spend Control offers six different types of analyses with a wide range of built-in measures which you can supplement as desired:

Various kinds of reporting analysis are powered by strong technical features ranging from basic to advanced.