Spend Analytics
AI-driven spend analytics solutions for business continuity
Procurement professionals are no longer just a team of buyers — they are strategic decision makers. However, the challenges that the function encountered about 10 years ago still exist today. And that is where smart technologies are making all the difference.*
In the recent past, spend analytics services have captured the imagination of CPOs and spend management professionals around the globe for a good reason. There is an overwhelming amount of unstructured data coming in from various sources, including supplier spreadsheets, ERP, and other disparate systems. These datasets are sitting in siloes and are not being utilised the way they should be. While modern-day enterprises do look at historical data to keep a tab on their spending, in a lot of cases, there is no consideration for the future.
From a business continuity perspective, this lack of advance planning and preparation could mean that emergency events, unforeseen crises, or disasters will have a detrimental impact on your business operations.
AI- and ML-powered spend analytics for business continuity
Your organisational continuity frameworks must evolve and take pre-emptive or preventive measures to ensure business resilience. Here are a few reasons why AI-driven spend analytics and procurement solutions can aid business continuity:
- With artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in procurement, it’s possible to cut down on the time and effort spent on completing repetitive tasks manually.
- Another huge advantage of using an AI-enabled solution is that you don’t just focus on spend analytics or historical data analysis but also look at strategic planning for the future.
- Additionally, the various challenges and common potential risks associated with business continuity can be detected and averted through accurate monitoring and reporting.
Procurement analytics or spend analytics software powered by AI basically works like Spotify for an individual user. Spotify algorithms use a combination of your listening history and what other users in your demographic are listening to in order to recommend new songs, albums, or artists that you might like. Similarly, AI-enabled spend analytics solutions are designed to collect relevant data and analyse it to establish where your organisation is spending its money, where the competition is spending its money, who your suppliers are, how the market is behaving, and what better opportunities exist that you can capitalise on. Apart from breaking down the information into easily consumable nuggets, the software also provides recommendations on how you can make smarter decisions to ensure more savings.
In simple words, here’s what an AI- and ML-powered spend analytics solution can do for your business continuity plan:
- Organise and present data in a digestible format
- Analyse spend patterns to devise strategic sourcing plans
- Provide guidance and transparency for future procurement
- Mitigate risks based on past performance and forecasts
Modern-day spend analytics solutions enable your team to extract data from massive and varied datasets, clean it up, organise it according to your unique needs, and visualise it in a digestible format using a multitude of visualisation tools.
AI-powered spend analytics platforms help create unprecedented visibility into past procurement and spending data, enabling you to identify success pointers and key gaps in your process. While companies traditionally used historical data to make decisions around their supplier selection, it is not the most ideal option from a strategic sourcing perspective. Spend analysis solutions help evaluate supplier performance, understand demand breakdown, conduct market analysis, and analyse specific spend patterns with reference to selected suppliers.
With greater visibility into your business spending and transparency through the procurement process, you get a holistic view that helps identify areas where spending can be optimised. This results in increased savings, optimum inventory, better governance, and smarter decisions to ensure compliance throughout the contract lifecycle. AI-enabled spend analytics combine your internal and external data and provide actionable insights, guiding your team to make proactive procurement decisions in the future.
Risks are an inherent part of procurement. It is essential to have a robust strategic management process that incorporates key risk factors for you to understand past performance and predict future outcomes. Spend analytics solutions help minimise risks by indicating past challenges and forecasting future roadblocks.
How Infosys BPM can help?
To address the key challenges in your procurement function, Infosys BPM has introduced ProcureEdge, an enterprise-grade spend intelligence offering. Designed to augment your organisation’s procurement ecosystem with AI-enabled tools, data management, spend classification, opportunity identification, and more, ProcureEdge can help you in your journey towards holistic digital transformation.
Learn more about our spend analytics platform.
*For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.
