Strategic Sourcing Europe

As you can see I love Top 10′s…

I was busy identifying leading providers covering the ‘spending analysis’ automation process when I found this nice report from the Aberdeen Group about the most successful spend management initiatives and the best practices they relied on. Below is the list and here is the full report “Best Practices in Spending Analysis” , accessible without any registration (hurry, it might not stay there for long).

So, the Top 10 best practices in spending analysis are:

1. Auditing existing spend data management capabilities.
2. Accessing all spend-data sources within and outside the enterprise.
3. Adopting a common classification schema enterprise-wide.
4. Establishing efficient and repeatable data cleansing and classification capabilities through the use of software or services.
5. Augmenting category expertise to ensure data and classification accuracy and validation.
6. Classifying spending at a detailed level.
7. Enhancing core spend data with vital business intelligence.
8. Increasing frequency and coverage of spending analyses.
9. Utilizing advanced reporting and decision support tools.
10. Continuously expanding uses and scope of spend data management program.

Reviewing those practices, my personal opinion is that only the TOP 5 are really critical, challenging and key to focus on at start.