How An eProcurement Team Can Demonstrate ROI
How An eProcurement Team Can Demonstrate ROI
As 2015 begins, many organizations are examining how well they achieved their 2014 goals, preparing the best ways to communicate that success in terms of measurable results for the company, and setting goals for the new year. According to a survey conducted in April of 2014, the top two priorities for an eprocurement team in the 2014-2016 time frame are:
- Increase the rate of cost savings
- Drive wider operational efficiencies through eprocurement
Top Priority: Determining your rate of cost savings
Demonstrating the rate of cost savings may be a clear metric, but just because it’s obvious, doesn’t mean it’s simple. The same Iasta Efficio survey brought to light the following challenges in tracking and analyzing spend data:
- Low quality of spend data from internal systems
- Labor intensive process of managing and collecting data
- Inability to identify and forecast savings opportunities
- High pressure to put more spend under management
- Inability to identify and prioritize top spend areas
- Inability to forecast contract expirations
The bottom line is, if you don’t have a spend analysis solution with robust savings-tracking reporting and analysis in place, it’s hard to provide critical savings data over a period of time. These are important pieces of data for your organization. If you don’t have a system in place now, consider getting one in place as a major goal for 2015. It will make your life a lot easier next year! The ability to easily and reliably report savings in 2016 will provide evidence to support your team’s contribution to the business.
Savings is always going to be a high priority topic because of its obvious link to profit, but in some ways I think the second-highest priority is the more interesting one. As a goal, “Driving wider operational efficiencies” is less directly connected to the bottom line and it’s certainly not brought up in conversation as much as savings, but I think it may better represent the larger value that an eprocurement team can offer the company. It approaches eprocurement as a basic skill that is significantly connected to supplier management and contract management.
Be sure to check in for the next post where we’ll go into more detail about how eprocurement teams operate in those spheres. In the meantime, we would love to hear about the top priorities of your eprocurement team in 2015.
