What prevents public sector organisations discovering and acting on their spend data?

It is absolutely vital that public sector organisations improve their procurement processes, in order to deliver greater efficiencies and implement savings opportunities. But in order to transform your procurement function and truly deliver those efficiencies, you first need to know exactly how you spend your money, what you spend it on and with whom. All too often your financial data does not deliver the level of detail and the right kind of information you need to support the development of procurement strategy and transform the procurement of bought-in goods and services.

Your financial system may not contain everything you need…

Your own financial systems give you an important part of the picture, but they may not contain all the information you need, in an accessible format, with the sufficient degree of granularity, to enable you to answer the questions you have from a procurement perspective. For example:

• Suppliers and items purchased are typically classified to support financial reporting and not to support the procurement process.
• Data may be incomplete, lacking supplier information such as the category of goods & services supplied, employee numbers, sales revenue and a whole host of other critical data.
• Many public sector bodies have “clutter” in their financial systems – multiple transactions with non-trade suppliers, which makes identification of ‘influenceable’ spend challenging.
• Most financial systems do not contain relevant data from other public sector organisations, severely limiting the possibility of generating meaningful comparisons or benchmarking your procurement performance with that of your peers.

Internal initiatives can’t provide the whole solution…

Sorting out these problems internally requires significant amounts of manpower, time and money. Even if they are addressed, if your data is not coded to common standards or cleansed and enhanced, there will be no consistency between your data and that of any other organisation in your sector. Without this consistency, it is almost impossible to identify potential money–saving, collaborative opportunities.

Spikes Cavell’s unique methodology combined with our powerful set of online tools provide customers with everything they need to kickstart the procurement transformation process.