Procurement and Spend Reporting
Spend by supplier, category and contract
You cannot negotiate what you cannot see. Spend reporting is the starting point for every procurement saving.
The problem
Spend data is spread across purchase orders, invoices, purchasing cards and Ariba, with supplier names spelt five ways and categories assigned inconsistently. Savings are claimed in a spreadsheet and never reconciled to the ledger. Contract compliance is an estimate, and maverick spend is found when the supplier complains.
What good looks like
A clean spend cube
Suppliers normalised, categorised, by entity and period, refreshed monthly.
Savings tracked to the ledger
Claimed savings reconciled to what was actually paid.
Compliance visible
On contract against off contract, purchase order against no purchase order, by buyer and category.
Supplier concentration and risk
Who you depend on, and how much.
How we approach it
Step 1
Agree the category tree and the supplier master rules with procurement and finance.
Step 2
Build the spend model in SAP Datasphere from S/4HANA purchasing and payables, and Ariba where used.
Step 3
Build SAP Analytics Cloud dashboards for procurement, category managers and finance.
Step 4
Validate against accounts payable for two months before handover.
Standard content we start from
Procurement has the deepest standard content of any area. For SAP Ariba, SAP ships seven SAP Analytics Cloud packages: Operational Reporting (requisition and approval, purchase order, invoice, strategic projects), Procure to Order (PO spend by commodity and supplier, contract versus off contract, on and off catalogue, requisition processing time, confirmations with back orders or rejections), Sourcing (events, participation, awarded amounts, savings trend, project pipeline), Contract Management (compliance against contract, contracts expiring in six months, clause usage), Invoice to Pay (invoice ageing, exceptions, price variance, PO versus non PO spend), Supplier Management (supplier 360) and Benchmark Reporting. Finance and Spend Analytics for SAP Procurement adds compliance, sourcing savings, process efficiency and working capital measures, and SAP Ariba Spend Analysis on Datasphere adds spend assessment, price optimisation across suppliers and supplier consolidation. For S/4HANA without Ariba there is the Procurement best practice scope item.
We start from these for Ariba clients and from the S/4HANA scope item otherwise. What the packages do not do is normalise suppliers and categories for clients without Ariba, reconcile claimed savings to the ledger, or join spend across several ERPs. That is the custom part, and AI categorisation of free text spend sits on top of it.
Questions people ask
Talk to us
If the category spend report takes a week to build, it is time to automate it.