Understanding what you spend is the most important part of strategic procurement. Without this, you can't do much else. You're shooting in the wind, not really knowing whether what you're tackling are the ripest opportunities.

While spend analysis tools have been around for a while, they're now becoming old hat.

The new generation provides spend analytics and guides you to where the best opportunities may be hiding in your spend data.

Taking it to a completely new level, the ability to combine spend analytics with process mining is game changing. If you're not sure what process mining is, it will save what would previously have taken days, if not weeks of work to find holes and inefficiencies in your processes.

The P2P process is a classic case of where this can be implemented effectively, and combined with spend analytics to drive both performance improvement and cost reduction.

That's what my guest today, Samir Kharkan, CEO of German startup SCALUE is here to talk about.

2:40

I start off by asking Samir the same question as I asked Kevin last week, and that is: what makes a vendor “cool”?

3:14

Spend ANALYSIS vs. spend ANALYTICS. What’s the difference, and how does analytics drive businesses forward more than just a standard analysis dashboard? How SCALUE and similar tools (see episode 3 with Eddie from Seaforth Analytics) differentiate themselves from the first wave of spend cube software

6:54

What is Process Mining, and how does this add further benefits beyond the spend analytics function in terms of analysing business processes to view potential inefficiencies and non-compliances?

8:30

Does a powerful tool such as spend analytics combined with process mining enable CPOs or CFOs to employ less experienced procurement managers now that software can do most of the heavy lifting? Spoiler: the answer is NO!

11:45

I ask Samir to walk through what the must-haves or prerequisites are on the customer’s side to ensure that implementation of a tool like SCALUE is successful. Samir’s "Captain of the ship" analogy is absolute gold!

15:47

We drill down into why this type of solution specifically solves a common problem for mid-sized companies, when considering this with the captain, ship and compass analogy that Samir so eloquently explains.

17:53

Is spend analytics and process mining also a relevant tool to use in professional service industries where there is no product being manufactured?

20:43

We drill down into an example of where an automotive supplier discovered 30% maverick spend in indirect services through the data made available by using SCALUE’s solution. Samir walks us through how they discovered it and then put measures in place to reduce this.

26:00

Let’s talk payback calculations…how long does it take for customers to typically see return on investment?

27:18

Samir gives a great example of how looking at invoice discrepancies based on drill down of incoterms can often give return on investment in just one swoop.

Samir's LinkedIn profile

SCALUE website