At the backend of last week I was lucky enough to get a sneak peak at Actionable Analytics v4.0, the latest version of the Zycus’s latest Spend Visibility suite. The new release focuses on breaking the mold of traditional business intelligence solutions, by firstly empowering the category managers to quickly find saving opportunities via a new feature set called “Opportunity Finder”. And secondly, allowing procurement leaders to track and manage their savings mandate using a pipeline base approach via the “Opportunity Pipeline Management” module.

Unlike the business intelligence solutions of old, going through the process of finding opportunities was surprisingly intuitive. Although I have not got the years of experience of a procurement practitioner, I can only assume category managers would very quickly be able identify savings opportunities using this solution.

Once a savings opportunity has been identified, it moves to the Opportunity Savings Pipeline. Based on the workflow of a sales pipeline you commonly find in a CRM solution, like Salesforce, the “Opportunity Pipeline Management” module allows category managers and procurement leaders to qualify the savings opportunities through further analysis.

The joy of this module is the ability for procurement leaders to review saving opportunities based on facts and figures, approve and prioritise them, and then create a funnel of savings activities. This type of functionality has enabled sales directors for years to accurately forecast and manage their sales pipeline and now this functionality is finally available for procurement professionals. Maybe this cross over from sales to procurement will be reflected in bonus payments for procurement leaders/managers based on the savings they deliver!

Pipeline based Spend Analysis Process for Procurement Leaders

• Get visibility into all identified savings opportunities across the organisation
• Prioritise opportunities that need to be acted upon
• Set savings & compliance target to the team and effectively track them

For procurement heads looking for a solution to gain better visibility of their spend and effectively manage saving opportunities, I would recommend taking a good look at the Zycus solution. Over the next few months I will be reviewing the other Spend Analysis solutions in the market and will come back to this short review, to give you a full comparison of the products out there.