Transformation through visibility

Significantly improved spend visibility is regarded as critical in the drive toward more effective procurement in the public sector. However, the barriers to delivering this visibility are significant. Source data is incomplete, often misclassified, usually dispersed across multiple, incompatible systems and not standardised. Yet any kind of procurement transformation requires access to detailed, accurate, comprehensive spend and supplier data.

How does your source data look?

Before we process, transform and enrich an organisation's source spend and supplier data, we routinely conduct a data-fitness-check (DFC) to trap and resolve any errors or issues, with the data.

Looking at a real example of a DFC process, where the customer was a large NHS trust - of the £592m of expenditure data delivered to us, more than £160m related to either duplicate rows or payments that we would have expected to have been excluded. This, combined with other problems in the source data, reduced the visible total net spend to £377m (57.13%). Once the non-trade spend was excluded, the real expenditure on procured goods & services was actually around £217m - a long way from the total net spend figure assumed at the outset.

Considerably improved ROI

We have seen similar ratios of final net spend to delivered expenditure data from across the more than 1,000 data sets we have already processed across all public sector areas. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that, without the application of creative solutions to fundamentally transform and enrich the expenditure data, the return on investment in any spend management programme will be extremely limited.