Spend less to acquire value
that meets your needs

"Will Parsons and Mark Allen provided really useful input to our Best Value Review of Procurement and helped us achieve a much better result with more substantial savings identified through improved procurement practices"

Francis Murphy
Best Value Officer
Southend-on-Sea Borough Council

Spend Data Analysis

Spend data analysis appears to have acquired an almost mythical aura, a black art, practiced only by specialist suppliers with secret and expensive software. How wrong this is! Most organisations could, if they wished, do their own spend analysis, as often as they want and for little or no cash cost, using widely available software and expertise they already employ.

Why analyse your spend data?

The results from analysing your spend data are important because:

• It is the most effective way to develop a comprehensive understanding of what your organisation has 'bought and from whom' and 'spent and by whom'
• Spend data does not lie, although it can be incorrectly input
• It is the starting point to determine if you spend your income wisely and to identify opportunities to improve
• You can monitor the impact of changes
• It helps you to modify procurement related behaviour

Achieve valuable insights

Repeatable, efficient and accurate spend data analysis will, amongst many other valuable benefits, help you to:

• Increase your purchasing power
• Determine your priorities accurately and quickly, for example your organisation's use, or not, of specific contracts and spend categories that will benefit from your immediate attention
• Identify opportunities for you to save cash
• Develop a deeper understanding of what you spend money on
• Identify potential supply risks to your organisation
• Improve the accuracy with which your organisation inputs spend data
• Achieve more value from existing contracts

You will be able to control the process and analyse spend data as often as you want, without being constrained by budgets, being tied to one supplier, availability of specialist suppliers or specialist software.

How we help?

Qualitar will develop your capability to analyse your spend data and identify valuable insights, as often as you want, without having to pay for expensive specialist suppliers and their software to do it for you.

It will take a day at your office to do this. We will guide you through the process, explaining how you will do an initial analysis and then be able to update it as regularly as you want. Whilst we will guide you, your employees will do the analysis to embed the process and its value to your organisation. You will also receive:

• A comprehensive guide for future reference and to reinforce the analysis
• On-going support by telephone and email for the next three months
• Future visits, as required

The spend data analysis process includes:

• Downloading data
• Reviewing data
• Adding and removing data
• Analysing data and producing results

We will, if requested, complete a full spend analysis for you, although we much prefer you to do this with our support. If we do the analysis for you we can apply our experience and identify opportunities which will achieve better results for you more quickly and more accurately.

What you need

The process we will guide you through is straightforward and easy to repeat regularly because it does not rely on specialist suppliers or software. You will need:

• Spend data from the accounts payable module of your accounting software for one to 24 or more months
• Microsoft® Excel® 2007
• Individuals willing to be responsible for spend data analysis, ideally with some knowledge of Microsoft® Excel®

For example

For the London Borough of Redbridge we showed them how to analyse their spend data using widely available software that they already owned. There was no need to buy expensive software or analysis services. They are able to analyse spend data at any time and track, in real time, the impact of new contracts and changes in purchasing behaviour.