Modernizing spend management amid rising demands

It is increasingly important to gain a comprehensive overview of all spending decisions. This includes direct and indirect spend, external workforce as well as travel and expenses.

• Direct spend: The purchase of goods and services that directly affect the end product.
• Indirect spend: The purchase of goods or services that support daily operations.
• External workforce: Independent contractors, temporary staff, and miscellaneous service providers.
• Travel and expense: Costs associated with business travel and other business-related activities.

Managing financial objectives is key for good business. But having a look after operational objectives, too.

On the one hand, leaders are tasked with optimizing manufacturing processes to reduce costs. But on the other hand achieving optimized manufacturing processes also ensure to deliver orders to customers consistently. Intelligent spend solutions help organizations to react in an agile and flexible way to all contingencies that otherwise would have affected the supply chain.

More than ever, there is a great movement to go green and achieve greater sustainability. This movement also has a major impact on the management of spends.

Meeting the modern environmental demands of today’s customers is crucial to stay competitive. The following questions must be answered:

• How to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?
• How to be more productive yet remain sustainable?
• How to implement processes to avoid waste?

Data-driven intelligent spend software and services allow to track all processes and help to pursue sustainability initiatives.

In many industries, automated procurement has long been standard. But often there is no central overview of all supplier relationships. Companies need an extensive and reliable supplier network.

Paperless tenders, contracts and invoices could also take spend management to a new level. By using procurement and supplier networks all procurement and spend activities in national and international markets are bundled in one place. With supplier classification, qualification and assessment it gets easier to find reliable suppliers that match the requirements. Likewise, the delivering ability increase and payment processes become faster.

Maintaining a strong and trusted reputation in the market is difficult if suppliers engage in substandard or immoral working practices. Organizations have to know who they are dealing with.

As part of intelligent spend management, an extensive supplier network allows to choose partners that comply with ethical working practices. On top of that, data-driven solutions give a 360°-view of the supply chain, improve cash flow and support in developing new products.

Black swan events and negatively disrupted supply chains make this normally routine objective a challenge. Supply chain resiliency has become more important than ever before.

Modern spend management solutions and collaboration tools help companies to become more flexible and strengthen the ability to develop new ways of sourcing what they need. It gets easier to adapt to any unexpected changes and to ensure the supply chain is as fortified as it can be. An intelligent enterprise with intelligent IT solutions manages financial, operational, environmental, and social objectives consistently – across all applications.