In today's economy, companies are under enormous pressure to reduce costs. To meet these challenges, companies are systematically launching high impact savings initiatives to leverage purchasing volume, consolidate suppliers, and reduce off-contract spend. However, without accurate business intelligence, it is very difficult to identify savings opportunities, initiate programs to capture the savings, and monitor compliance. Businesses need to have accurate and timely information to answer the following questions:

• How much is spent on each commodity? Who are the suppliers? How much is spent with each supplier? How has this changed over time?
• How fragmented is the supply base? Are there opportunities for supply base consolidation?
• Are buyers utilizing existing contracts when buying supplies?

Optimization technologies assist the decision makers with answering these fundamental questions by reducing the difficulties and time requirements associated with analyzing raw data coming in from transactional systems. TechFlow's SRM solutions provide powerful analytical tools that transform raw transactional data coming in from multiple back-end systems, such as General Ledger or ERP systems, to identify sourcing and savings opportunities, and to track spend against contract.

The Spend & Compliance module of TechFlow's SRM solution provides insights on spending with a supplier and against specific contracts made with that supplier. Spend is focused on how much money is flowing to the supplier for particular goods or services. Compliance is focused on how much of the total spending with a given supplier is under the terms and rates of a contract, which is referred to as "spend under management". The "spend under management" is considered a key metric for the efficiency and control of a procurement organization. Reporting and analysis features provide insight into organizational spend, and help to identify spending patterns. During this process, transactional or raw data is converted into knowledge.

• Quickly identify key categories for sourcing activity
• Effectively track diverse supplier spend
• Uncover spending patterns through comprehensive reporting and analysis
• Consolidate buys to receive volume-based discounts
• Track compliance regarding usage of preferred supplier contracts

Following is an example of one of the reports available in the Spend Analysis module. It ranks the top commodities by total spend. This report also provides a count of the number of suppliers with spend in that commodity, with a drill-down to the list of suppliers that account for the spend.

SRM focuses on the coordination of all interactions with your supply base, such as contract negotiation, supplier assessment, and sourcing. It is primarily focused on automating person-to-person interactions between a company and its suppliers to lower costs, improve service levels, and provide insights. It can be used as a sourcing tool to facilitate the procurement of goods and services through auctions. But, it also has very powerful analytical capabilities that can help management evaluate their course of actions and make better, more timely decisions. For more information on how to unlock your existing data and turn it into powerful analytical tool that gives you a competitive edge, click here >>