Vendor Management with Supplier 360 Analytics

Oftentimes, information about a supplier is spread out across different systems from the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to contract management system (CMS) to external third-party data service/system, and more.

With Supplier 360 Analytics, businesses can get a comprehensive view of any supplier at any given time through a series of Tableau reports and dashboards consolidating data from fragmented source systems. By centralizing supplier information, businesses can easily evaluate supplier performance and manage their vendor relationships.

What Challenges does Supplier 360 Analytics Address?

When the Procurement team is tasked with providing specific data on particular suppliers, it can be a manual process that ends up taking weeks to pull together the required information.

With Supplier 360 Analytics, your Sourcing team can quickly – we’re talking minutes, not weeks – get the information needed to evaluate supplier performance in and answer questions, like:

• • What contracts do we have in place and when are they expiring?
  • Do we need to extend contracts or make change orders?
  • How much money is being spent on the contracts?
  • Are purchase orders aligning with your contract expectations?
  • Is invoice spend aligning to what the purchase order is – or is it over/under by a margin?
  • Where are we at with purchase order spend for a specific project?
  • What is the risk score of a particular supplier? Is it facing any legal or financial issues?
  • Are we spending money on the same supplier across departments, entities?

Supplier 360 Analytics can minimize supply chain leaks – the inefficiencies and missed opportunities spread across your supplier network. With Supplier 360 Analytics, businesses can see with a specific supplier where spend is happening, what departments or business areas is that spend being incurred, and how that is impacting the company and who are the key stakeholders involved.

Benefits of Supplier 360 Analytics

While there are numerous benefits of Supplier 360 Analytics, the top 5 benefits are contract negotiations, time-savings, data accuracy, increased transparency, and proactive risk management and data governance.

1. 1. Contract Negotiations. Global organizations with several entities run the risk of having redundancies across the enterprise. As a result, companies likely are paying more than they should because they aren’t able to take advantage of discounts by combining offerings across the organization. Supplier 360 Analytics provides insight by showing Strategic Sourcing teams exactly how much they are spending with a supplier and what departments that supplier is supporting, opening the door for the organization to have the upper hand in negotiation discussions for future contracts.
   2. Time-savings for Procurement. Especially with the growing trend towards shared services – where companies are consolidating various entities into one – all these different entities can still leverage the same Procurement team to answer their questions. With this truly holistic solution, Procurement will be saving weeks of time previously spent gathering and consolidating information – which enables a company to truly do more with fewer resources. Procurement is then able to be a proactive business partner to the functions it supports and be timely in the requests related to suppliers and contracts.
   3. Real-time, Accurate Data for Reporting & Analysis. Companies often rely on a third-party to help aggregate their data and that can never be done in real-time. For example, a quarterly report means you can only run analytics quarterly at which point your information is already stale versus having your data within minutes means companies can more accurately make decisions based on current information. Having timely data will ensure Procurement can better support its business partners, and Strategic Sourcing will always have the latest information for negotiation contracts and selecting vendors.
   4. Increased transparency into your data. Additionally, when companies rely on the assumed accuracy of a third-party to aggregate their data, the third-party also owns all the data so there’s minimal visibility into the business rules and calculations that go into creating your report. With Supplier 360 Analytics, you’re able to make your data work for you. You can more easily change your dashboards or run ad-hoc reports – and more importantly, drill-down into the underlying data through Tableau.
   5. Proactive risk management and data governance. With modern dashboards, real-time information, and more visibility into your data, businesses can more easily recognize trends and take a proactive approach to negotiating contracts and catching potential long-term data governance issues, such as if purchase order spend with a particular supplier is consistently higher than the contract amount, or purchase orders are assigned to the incorrect cost centers.

The Takeaway

Supplier 360 Analytics provides tremendous value to an organization by enabling short and long-term strategic decision-making, helping navigate your vendor negotiations and relationships, and managing spend.

However, the value of Supplier 360 Analytics is only as good as your data so it’s important to have defined business and governance processes for data quality management.

Stratos Consulting’s data and analytics experts can help your organization evaluate its processes and identify the key components needed to link your different systems and/or third-party data together for a true 360 degree view of your supplier network – reach out to us today to get started.