Spend Analysis: The Window into Strategic Sourcing

A growing number of senior executives are coming to realize that strategic supply management can be a significant driver of improved corporate performance and better risk management. Spend analysis is the most critical component, and the starting point, of strategic supply management and is essential to achieving world-class performance. If you can’t analyze your spend data, many opportunities for improvement beyond the low hanging fruit are without doubt being missed. One of the foundation blocks for transforming an organization’s practices to world-class supply management is the business process called strategic sourcing. And one of the requirements for enabling world-class strategic sourcing results is rigorous spend analysis.

There is a lot of confusion on what constitutes spend analysis and what benefits can it provide. Spend analysis can help improve several areas: the identification of cost reduction opportunities, the prioritization of sourcing projects, the negotiated results, and the tracking and monitoring to ensure that negotiated results reach the bottom-line. It can also play an important role in improving compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. However, implementations are complex and involve many departments within an organization. If the implementations are done correctly, they can yield high ROI. If not, they can consume money and deliver no returns due to lack of adoption.

Spend Analysis: The Window into Strategic Sourcing is the definitive text on this important subject, written by leaders in the field. It is currently the only reference that provides in-depth guidance on what spend analysis really is, what it involves specifically and how to use it in your journey to world-class performance. It provides both an executive overview and technical details for practitioners. Readers do not need specialized knowledge in database systems, information technology or any other field to gain insights from reading this book. It is a must read for procurement, supply chain management, operations, and finance executives, and for practitioners and consultants.

About the Authors

Kirit Pandit is Vice President of Content Strategy and the Head of Product Management for the Spend Analysis and Compliance Solution at Emptoris, Inc. He has over twelve years of experience in the areas of procurement transformation, supply chain optimization, and content management. Since 2000, he has been working to design and elicit value from procurement processes and data to enable better spend visibility and savings.

Kirit has been with Emptoris since early 2005 when Emptoris acquired Intigma, a spend data management company that he co-founded in 2000. Intigma was one of the first companies to offer a disruptive technology for automating the conversion and enrichment of spend data so as to offer complete and accurate spend visibility. In 2004, Intigma was providing spend data management services to four of the top six spend analysis providers. In addition to being the CEO at Intigma, he played important roles in product management, key customer and channel relationships, and governance and financing efforts.

Prior to starting Intigma, Kirit spent four years at Deloitte Consulting, where he implemented supply chain optimization and e-procurement solutions for Fortune 500 customers. Prior to joining Deloitte, he spent six years at National Instruments in Austin, Texas as a Senior Design Engineer, where he developed cutting-edge products for the test and measurement industry.

He has published papers in scientific and business journals and has spoken at investor and industry forums. In 2006, he was the recipient of the "Pros to Know" award from Supply and Demand Chain Magazine.

Kirit holds a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and an M.S in Electrical Engineering as well as an M.B.A. from The University of Texas at Austin.

Haralambos Marmanis is Director of Research and Chief Architect of Spend Analysis and Compliance Solutions at Emptoris, Inc., where he introduced and implemented machine learning and data mining techniques in sourcing, content management, and spend analysis. His work expeiencs quite diverse, ranging from network protocols, cardiovascular flow simulations, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to trading applications, electronic marketplaces, and supply chain management.

Dr. Marmanis is a recipient of the Sigma Xi Outstanding Research Award (1999). His scientific work has received support from the National Science Foundation and his work on visualizing multivalued data has been featured on the cover page of the Visualization '99 Conference Proceedings. He was an invited lecturer in the Joint Conference on Information Sciences (2007) and is the author of numerous publications in peer-reviewed international scientific journals and conference proceedings as well as in technical periodicals.

He holds a Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from Brown University, an M.Sc. degree in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessalonica.