Your data is telling you something – are you wired to hear it?
Your business sits atop a mountain of data that grows bigger by the day. Mining it to your advantage requires not just understanding it, but making it actionable by integrating it into your operations to gain new insights and efficiency. Gibson Consulting partners with companies to help them extract and evaluate the data captured in their IT systems and leverage it for effective reporting, business intelligence, and strategy.
Alignment before action
Our Sourcing IT Infrastructure practice starts with focused surveys and on-site workshops with key members of your IT, Operations, Procurement, and Finance teams to create a comprehensive picture of your current business and technology processes, information needs, and infrastructure weaknesses.
Making data actionable across your organization
To help you convert massive quantities of data from disparate sources into valuable, usable information, we bring in-depth knowledge of the systems that enable business processes and best-of-breed procurement packages. Together, we’ll identify and implement the optimal suite of tools to achieve your objectives. Our most successful clients typically apply a combination of Spend Analysis, eSourcing, eProcurement, and Contract Lifecycle Management tools as part of their infrastructure improvement initiatives. By addressing these simultaneously, we can deepen the positive impact of applying data effectively across your organization.
Only quality data provides meaningful business insights, which is why spend data and customer data classification is essential to gain cross-functional visibility and intelligence. Our approach to data classification allows our clients to achieve better than 95% classification of spend data over a short period of time.
Supply Chain Information Management software interfaces with the vast majority of all known systems, but the stakes are high for selecting the right options and applying them effectively. We’ll work closely with you throughout this process, including identifying the cost and usage-rights variables that are best for your business:
- Individual per person user fee (hosted outside)
- Individual per person user fee (hosted in-house)
- Rented by project
- Lease with purchase option
- Purchased and financed
- Rented only
- Global license
- Limited usage license
Recovering costs quickly
Costs can be passed back through to suppliers as a percentage of spend by category, or negotiated individually by supplier and recouped over time. Our negotiations typically lead to software investments being fully covered by suppliers after 2 years on average.
- Cost-effective purchasing and licensing
- Access to world-class software previously available only to world’s largest corporations
- Accelerated process implementation
- Significantly reduced burden of many users learning sophisticated skills software (i.e. Access, SQL, etc.)
- Companywide standardization to common processes
- Global information sharing in standardized formats for sourcing
- $0 impact potential by passing back costs to suppliers
- Ability to accurately and precisely measure sourcing processes, success, savings, and supplier performance
- Easier and more effective supplier communications
Our Strategic Sourcing Infrastructure and Improvement Project will help any client achieve
sustainability, repeatability, and independence.
Gibson conducts all sourcing projects on a framework of detailed data analytics. During the diagnostic phase, we benchmark current classification systems, data management tools, performance tracking, and reporting and implementation tracking tools.
Electronic Tools
1. eSourcing
An eSourcing platform is a web-based application that automates the processes of sourcing events (e.g. Reverse Auctions, RFQs, RFIs, etc.). These platforms integrate with supplier databases and networks to enable event management, provide savings analyses, and in some cases provide ePurchasing functions, which can include placing and managing orders, EDI interactions, and automated shipping notices, among others. The combination of strategic eSourcing with transactional ePurchasing constitutes true eProcurement.
2. Contract Management (CLM)
Contract management offers the ability to realize negotiated savings and maximum value from contracts through real-time monitoring and tracking of compliance and utilization across the contract lifecycle. It also allows clients to consistently score suppliers in a centralized system.
Typical Fortune 1000 Companies are unable to locate more than a small percentage of their typical 20,000-40,000 active contracts at any given time. CLM systems eliminate this vulnerability and deliver specific benefits including standard contract templates, organization-wide visibility, status and metric tracking, maverick speed control, compliance, and internal controls (SOX), which can add up to a clear competitive advantage.
3. Spend Analysis
Spend Analysis is the process of collecting, cleansing, classifying, and analyzing expenditure data with the ultimate goal of reducing procurement costs, improving efficiency, and monitoring compliance. The myriad of opportunities range from unearthing “in-the-weeds” savings opportunities within your organizational spend data to performing faster analysis by reducing bottlenecks. This process gives organizations a true vendor master that provides an accurate picture of spending and supplier relationships.
Even with disparate sets and sources of data – like inbound freight, accounts payable, purchase orders, Pcards, etc. – spend analysis examines different data sets and encompasses the entire cleansing and classification process to quickly achieve 90+% accuracy, with ideal targets in the 95%-98% range. Cleansing and classification also leaves your business with the ongoing means to own your processes and methodologies while meeting procurement-specific standards such as UNSPSC. It’s also an opportunity to implement a global solution, complete with translations and localizations where necessary.
Spend Analysis Challenges
- Prioritizing and implementing cost-cutting programs
- Data that is often incomplete, too high-level, or not up-to-date
- Underinvestment in the means to access the data driving their decisions
- Sub-optimizing current providers’ programs and results
- Local vs. Global optimization
- Potentially misleading solution classification (i.e., 80% data accuracy)
- 50,000 suppliers with less than 100,000 USD of spend
- Temptation to expand scope of spend visibility (more fields) at the risk of becoming incomplete and inaccurate
Spend Analysis Key Advantages:
- New capabilities and standards for spend data cleansing, classification, and reporting
- Transparency and control of the entire data management process
- Flexibility with the classification of disparate data sources and formats
- Speed of execution – days or weeks vs. months or years with other approaches
- Value of new and lower cost standards for affordable classification solutions
- Success in classification coverage (95%+) and accuracy
- Outcomes broader and easier to implement
- Global answers even without regional and cultural understanding or multilingual capabilities
- User flexibility with the ability to analyze data through its own toolset
