In the second part, we will delve upon the Visibility being an important factor and a key objective for Procurement Professionals in 2014. To read the part 1 of this blog series, that discusses about the focus on Improving Profits, click here.

According to the survey only 40% of procurement professionals revealed that they have significant ability to view spend data by supplier on an enterprise-wide basis. As per the Hackett Group 2013 study, World Class Companies had significant enterprise wide information availability for 89% of suppliers.

Lack of a holistic view is a major impediment to identifying savings opportunities, spend patterns across suppliers, utilization of contract terms and, more importantly, tracking the performance of key suppliers.

Best-in-class organizations are leveraging technology to provide seamless information across the various dimensions of the procurement function and not just getting visibility into supplier spend data. An integrated Source-to-Pay solution assists procurement professionals with a single view across the various stages of the procurement processes.

Some of the key benefits of integrating procurement processes are:

• Better Visibility:

An integrated view of spend analysis with supplier management will provide better visibility, not only in terms of spend per supplier, but also segmented per categories and savings realized per supplier. Information like this can better enable procurement professionals to sharpen their category sourcing strategies, and reap better results from their sourcing initiatives, leading to savings more quickly.

• Monitor Maverick Spend and Realize better Savings Opportunities:

With the integration of spend analysis, supplier management and contract management, organizations will be able to view on-contract and off-contract spends made in each category with each supplier. This not only helps with tracking of maverick spending, but also helps monitor suppliers on key contract terms. Also, if certain spend is off-contract with a certain supplier, the organization or the procurement professional raising the Purchase Order will be alerted regarding the contract (and the discount agreed upon in the contract), enabling realization of saving opportunities with the ability to view enterprise-wide data in a few clicks.