procurement and spend management

NTT DATA Business Solutions

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from procurement to intelligent spend managament

Procurement becomes intelligent spend management

Organizations are confronted with an ever-changing business world in which demands, and requirements are growing and processes are becoming more global, complex, and digital. Likewise, stakeholders in the supply chain, procurement, finance, and accounts payable face intense competitive pressure to improve compliance, reduce costs, gain more process control, and adapt to a changing workforce at once. To meet these growing demands, business leaders need an end-to-end platform that helps them to get a comprehensive overview on spend categories, while delivering best-in-class capabilities for those who rely on them. This is where we need the change to intelligent spend management.

What Does Intelligent Spend Management Stands for?

In recent years procurement involved into spend management. Today we’re talking about intelligent spend management, which is the development towards a strategic business function with innovative, technological support. With cloud-based intelligent spend software it is possible to digitalize all source-to-pay processes in a compliant and results-targeted manner. Therefore, organizations gain full control over direct and indirect spend, external workforce as well as travel and expenses.

6 factors of intelligent spend management

1. Obtain a complete overview

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.

2. Go beyond traditional financial measures

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.

3. React to sustainability issues

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.

4. Build up a reliable supplier network

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.

5. Support social causes

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.

6. Get goods to end customers

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.

Take back control for holistic spend management

Intelligent Spend Management is about bringing partner networks and ecosystems together to capture every source of spend, across each category, for one unified view – freeing businesses to focus on more important challenges.

SAP SE, SAP Intelligent Spend Management, 2019

Intelligent spend management becomes essential for intelligent enterprises
trusted partner for effective spend management

Your trusted partner for intelligent spend management

We are a trusted SAP partner with over 30 years of experience. Already more than 6,000 customers place their trust in our solutions and services, since we understand your market, your industry and your technology. Our local proximity and global capabilities, combined with our employees’ values enable us to transform your requirements into long-lasting, individual business solutions.

Additionally, as an SAP Innovation Partner, we are closely involved in the developments regarding SAP Intelligent Spend Management solutions, including SAP Ariba, SAP Ariba Snap and SAP Concur. On top of that, NTT DATA Business Solutions is an SAP Platinum Partner and has won the SAP Pinnacle Award as Intelligent Spend Management Partner of the Year for outstanding contributions in 2020.

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cloud based intelligent spend management solutions

How our spend management solutions support you

Our cloud-based intelligent spend solutions help procurers and other relevant stakeholders to get a holistic overview on spending and drive organizational value. Companies are now able to connect buyers with suppliers in a digital marketplace, control incoming and outgoing costs, and gain transparency over spending – all from a single source. Additionally, these effective solutions support the management of an increasingly external workforce, from initial onboarding to the final quality review.

Combined with our expertise and best practices, as well as our own solutions and services NTT DATA Business Solutions delivers you the perfect foundation for intelligent spend management. With our SAP solutions, we can achieve the following improvements for our customers:

80%
Cost reduction to process an invoice
75%
Time reduction to process an invoice
1.5 Days
Invoice-to-payment cycle times

Intelligent spend management software and solutions

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