Spend Analytics Technology

Efficio spend analytics uses our own procurement technology, tools and methodology to collate and present vast amounts of data in a meaningful way.

Data is often distributed between a large number of financial and ERP systems, across many different geographical and business entities. Purchasing activity itself may be widely distributed and can include significant unofficial, ‘maverick’ or non-compliant activity. This is where Efficio’s Spend Analytics services can help.

Efficio applies structure and analytics to deliver deep insight into categories and suppliers at many levels, linking and enriching data from many sources. Spend analysis technology reveals savings opportunities and tracks performance.

Efficio’s spend analytics will help you:

  • Take control of the procurement process
  • Identify savings opportunities by rationalizing the supplier base
  • Take advantage of savings opportunities arising from growth and increased procurement leverage
  • Eliminate maverick and non-compliant or off-contract behavior
  • Track and verify procurement performance and improvement

We start by agreeing a standard taxonomy: a multilevel ‘tree’ to which spend categories and individual orders can be allocated.  A route might be Indirects > IT > Hardware > Laptops.

The foundation of spend analytics enables us to identify all sources of data on different systems, which we then pull together into a ‘spend cube’. We cleanse and verify the data: for example, different descriptions for the same input, or different trading names used by the same supplier. The team also imports additional data such as baselines, budgets, contract details, negotiated rates and supplier data.
 

eFlow

Once you have this granular visibility, our spend analysis technology platform, eFlow, enables you to ‘refresh’ the spend cube at regular intervals, for example by automatically identifying repeat suppliers.

The spend analytics module in eFlow, together with our Tableau visualization tool, allows you to drill down into the appropriate level of the spend cube. Custom dashboards are easily created to suit the requirements of individual users and we train your team to use the visualization tools.

eFlow spend analytics technology allows you to:

  • Spot savings opportunities
  • Compare budgets and outcomes
  • Monitor compliance
  • Verify the achievement of targeted savings
Efficio's eFlow spend analytics enabled us for the first time to obtain detailed visibility of Fujitsu's global procurement spend. Until then this has been a significant challenge due to our organizational complexity and the large number of ERP systems we operate. The Spend Analytics tool is easy and intuitive to use and designed to support the identification of procurement opportunities.

Mikko Kivisto,, Country Procurement, Corporate Purchasing Unit at Fujitsu

Our expertise

Efficio conducts more than 30 spend analytics initiatives with clients each year, representing over $145 billion of external expenditure so far. Our clients range from small companies to global corporations, as well as Private Equity portfolio investors.

Noteworthy clients include: 

  • Fujitsu: 47 entities across 100 countries, four regions and four ERP systems, analyzing millions of transaction records across $3 billion of spend. We helped it derive a prioritized list of savings opportunities and gain deep category insights to inform their sourcing strategies. 
  • Accudyne refreshes its $600 million, 7-country, 10+ systems spend cube on a monthly basis, while COOP Denmark, with a DKK 60 billion spend, refreshes quarterly.

Spend analytics is a critical element of how we understand the value potential for our clients: we believe it should be a core part of your own operations.