Corbus offers a comprehensive spend analysis program that delivers the most accurate picture of company wide spending from data collection and analysis to validation and reporting. Corbus has a long term record of success in delivering hard dollar savings as high as 30-40% in both indirect and direct spend to various Fortune 100 companies.
Program Background
To put in simple terms, the primary objective of the Corbus spend analytics program is to collect, analyze and validate company-wide category spend information with the objective of understanding the entirety of spend in a given category, identify logical spend families and identify and prioritize sourcing targets.
Organizational Challenges with Spend Data:
- Organizational spend data is scattered throughout disparate systems; it is very difficult for organizations to know exactly how much is being spent, with whom and for what purpose, and what actions will deliver the greatest hard dollar savings.
- Some spend analysis programs are typically available internally in some shape or form, however, they are mostly built from the accounting/financial perspective providing limited value.
- Lack of internal resources to develop and maintain this program.
- Lack of internal expertise - Significant analytics capabilities are needed both in the extraction and cleansing of the data and in performing the spend analytics.
- Lack of standard General Ledger and Account codes as well as standard naming conventions and part numbering schemes, such as UNSPC codes.
- Lack of integrated P-Card spend data and detail.
- Lack of detail available in A/P transactional files.
- Lack of detail for spend transactions not captured utilizing purchase orders, blanket orders and P-Cards.
Corbus Spend Analysis tool, built by our in-house commodity experts with years of experience serving Fortune 100 clients, effectively and successfully addresses the above challenges.
Corbus Spend Analysis Process
Corbus' spend analysis process begins with the data collection activity from various sources like Accounts Payable, Purchase Orders, T&E reports, P-Card, etc., so that a comprehensive database of organization-wide spend information can be built. Once this database is built and validated, it is further scrubbed and enriched to make it more usable and is categorized using the UNSPSC-based coding system. The end result is the creation of an actionable, intelligent database that provides full transparency across various categories of spend enabling multiple views of spend data by business unit, time frame, etc.
A Spend Analysis process is typically repeated cyclically on a quarterly, monthly or even weekly basis generally requiring the insertion of another group of transactions. The level of effort is highest during initial dataset construction, cleansing and enriching various data sets. The most common cleansing/categorization effort is to clean the Vendor Master of duplicates.
After grouping Vendor Master duplicates together, it is sometimes useful to perform a "who owns whom" analysis, grouping "Lotus" under "IBM," for example. This is useful only when discount levels with the parent company are affected by spending with a child entity.
Corbus utilizes in-house automated programs supported by extensive manual quality checks by our commodity experts to cleanse and categorize data sets resulting in precise categorization of data sets and actionable ready to use information. The analyzed spend data will give insight into past and current spending patterns.
Corbus Spend Analysis program delivers the following key strategic benefits:
- Analyzes, identifies and prioritizes sourcing initiatives – Sr. Management savings objectives and refinement of opportunities.
- Identifies post merger/acquisition savings.
- Views company-wide spend by various dimensions, e.g. supplier, business unit, time frame, commodity, etc.
- Provides key input to sourcing organization design – structure, resource planning and talent acquisition.
- Provides key input for monitoring compliance – Are we consistently buying the right items and/or from the right suppliers?
- Savings tracking and measurement.
Reports
The tool provides both textual and graphical reports that allows analysts, CFO, COO and customers to analyze the spend on vendors, ultimate parents and products which helps in decision making.
Reports can be exported in multiple formats such as Microsoft Excel, Word, Adobe PDF, and TIFF image.
The tool offers a variety of reports like:
- Commodity Vendor Spending
- Vendor Analysis
- Parentage Relationship and Spending
- Vendor Diversity Spending
- Vendor Spending
- Commodity Spending
- Ad-hoc Reports
