SPEND ANALYSIS

A successful sourcing program hinges on the ability of an enterprise to thoroughly understand it’s spend. Getting spend analysis right is a mandatory step toward actual cost reduction, continual process improvement and value creation.

Spend analysis services from S.T.A.R Procurement help leading companies across the globe identify — and realize — multimillion-dollar savings opportunities previously unknown to them.

Our spend analysis consultants are motivated by the same goals and measure success just as you do — through actual realized savings.

Experience, Expertise and Technological Capability:

S.T.A.R Procurements industry-leading spend analysis consulting teams are made up of highly driven category and commodity experts with an extensive range of capabilities. Apart from being seasoned professionals and veterans of top-level engagements, our consultants are thoroughly fluent with cutting-edge spend analysis technology and are prepared to go the extra mile to deliver success. That means not just making recommendations and wishing you luck — our teams turn strategy into action and convert your targets into actual results.

Detailed Spend Analysis:

Spend analysis requires strong attention to detail. Our spend analysis solutions are thorough, comprehensive and broad in scope. We collate spend data from several systems and organize it to derive actionable insight on enterprise purchase activity. We deploy highly advanced, fully tested AI-based spend analysis tools to attain an impressive classification accuracy of 95 percent. This sets the stage for correct development and execution of strategic sourcing plans — a key factor in procurement’s effectiveness.

What can S.T.A.R Procurements spend analysis outsourcing services do for your enterprise?

• Aggregate, normalize and enrich spend data
• Bring more spend under management
• Improve contract compliance
• Compare attributes across suppliers and commodities
• Understand all fixed and variable cost drivers to develop robust sourcing strategies
• Boost cost savings from strategic sourcing initiatives
• Reduce sourcing cycle times
• Tap into the expertise of highly qualified consultants from leading markets worldwide

Understanding Spend Taxonomy

Spend taxonomy is the classification of enterprise sourcing or spend groups ordered by categorical hierarchy, ranging from general to specific based on spend complexity. The ranges usually include four levels with level one being the “Group,” two being “Family,” three being “Category,” and four being “Commodity.” The last level — commodities — is made up of a unique set of suppliers with similar core competencies.

Taxonomies are essential elements of data processing (cleansing, classification and enriching), in which line items are represented in the specified taxonomy. The absence of a robust taxonomy weakens classification, negatively impacting the quality of insight derived from spend analysis.

Spend Analysis Outsourcing – Why S.T.A.R Procurement?

Unlike most other spend management providers, S.T.A.R Procurement gives its customers much more than nicely wrapped and presented spend analysis reports.

Our solutions generate real value with purchase data visibility that enables new, enterprise-level strategic input for procurement. We go well beyond insight and place our emphasis on helping procurement outsourcing clients become best-in-class.

STRATEGIC SOURCING

How can you be more strategic in your strategic sourcing process? At a point where procurement organizations are recognizing their potential to contribute to the top as well as the bottom line, how can procurement teams maximize cost savings as well as generate additional value for the enterprise?

S.T.A.R Procurement has answers to these questions. We are one of the leading providers of strategic sourcing outsourcing services in the world. Every year, we help hundreds of organizations effectively execute their sourcing strategies to save billions in spend. Staffed with experienced category specialists, our strategic sourcing consultants get sustainable results fast — real results that improve the bottom line and boost competitive advantage.

Innovation Unlocks Opportunity

S.T.A.R Procurement has pioneered and refined a holistic approach for sourcing strategy and spend management.

Our sourcing strategy uses a combination of techniques and tools that go far beyond unit price reduction. We deploy our expertise at a much higher level to address deeper, often untapped opportunities for savings, including:

• Spend Consolidation
• Demand Management
• Product Rationalization
• Value Improvement
• Should-Cost Analysis
• Operational Cost Reduction
• Continuous Improvement
• Low-Cost Country Sourcing

Our strategic sourcing consulting and delivery approach is flexible at its core. As a leading sourcing services provider, we listen to your needs and configure solutions according to your specific goals. We run multiyear programs to achieve specific savings targets as well as short-term, category-specific engagements geared toward shoring up in-house expertise.

Direct & Indirect Sourcing

While direct sourcing is concerned with ensuring continuity of production and sustaining a company’s bottom line, indirect sourcing focuses on systemic issues like maverick buying, which has less impact on production and more on a company’s ability to control costs. Nonetheless, a holistic approach to managing both direct and indirect spend can deliver a big payoff in terms of supporting the enterprise’s long-term financial health and stability.

S.T.A.R Procurement has years of experience managing end-to-end sourcing activities for global enterprises — we oversee more than $200 million in annual spend, and that includes both indirect and direct spend categories. We understand that direct and indirect sourcing teams have distinct goals, and we are proud of the trust our clients place in us to deliver exceptional results on both fronts.

CATEGORY MANAGEMENT

As procurement continues to evolve from a tactical to a strategic enterprise function, CPOs and other senior procurement leaders are being evaluated on their team’s strategic contributions to the success of the business.

Cost control and take-out remain as prime objectives, but procurement’s mission is increasingly seen as impacting both the top and bottom lines, with a direct connection to enterprise growth and competitiveness. How can you start meeting these intensified expectations — delivering impressive savings, yes, but also creating value that indicates progress toward organizational maturity?

S.T.A.R Procurements category management services not only help procurement teams in market-leading enterprises worldwide save more money, but also contribute value in ways that include improving supplier performance, mitigating supply risks, and driving innovation and continuous improvement.

SUPPLY MARKET INTELLIGENCE

Being the sourcing specialist, S.T.A.R Procurement understands the importance of having the right market intelligence — at the right time — for sourcing-related decision-making. Access to timely, accurate and actionable supply chain intelligence is a huge strategic advantage. Not having it exposes firms to sizeable sourcing-related risk.

S.T.A.R Procurements category-based supply market intelligence (SMI) team supports CPOs and procurement professionals from market-leading enterprises worldwide, and STARs own procurement consultants, through custom-configured procurement research deliverables and engagement models.

Procurement Focused Market Intelligence Offerings

Procurement professionals can make confident, informed decisions when insights are tailored to their industry/geography/scale. Our procurement market intelligence reports give you real-time insights, and your team gets a decisive competitive edge when confronting big questions and problems, such as:

• Supplier Intelligence: Am I working with the right suppliers? What levers can I use to negotiate a better deal with my incumbent suppliers?
• Pricing Intelligence: Am I paying the optimal price?
• Sourcing Intelligence: Do best-in-class companies adopt a different engagement model?
• Procurement Intelligence: What benchmarks can I include as part of the contractual terms?
• Competitive Market Intelligence: How are my peers sourcing? What are they doing differently?

We also know there are times when you need a quick overview of a spend category, along with a quick snapshot of the supply market analysis. S.T.A.R Procurements SMI team is ready to fulfill these requests with off-the-shelf procurement reports (category dossiers) on numerous mainstream categories.

Syndicated Research:

S.T.A.R Procurements market intelligence (MI) team offers category intelligence on several hand-picked topics that represent critical concerns for clients across the spectrum. Our off-the-shelf procurement research reports (category dossiers) are spread across key categories, such as marketing, MRO & logistics, professional services, IT, and much more. They contain key market insights and serve as best-in-class sourcing guides for category managers from client sourcing teams.

These research reports are updated frequently and provide cutting-edge actionable insights that clients can leverage during category strategy formulation.

Custom Advisory:

Our custom supply chain research is tailored to client specific needs, and research output is based on factors such as client industry, scale of operations and region in scope. Research requirements incorporate each individual clients current positioning and sourcing plan.

TAIL-SPEND MANAGEMENT

Your tail spend is one of the biggest sources of incremental savings available.

In fact, if you stacked up the individual spend on each supplier in that tail, you might find that, taken together, the tail is your biggest supplier.

In an economic and business environment where CFOs are leaving no stone unturned in the quest for cost reduction, no doubt tail spend can help you make your numbers.

S.T.A.R Procurement has helped dozens of leading companies turn their tail spend into an operational advantage.

In addition to significant realized savings (not just a net positive return on investment), benefits of a tail-spend management program with S.T.A.R Procurement include:

• Reduced cost of procurement operations
• Increased spend under management
• Improved purchasing experience for end users

Success Requires Experience

Tail spend is fraught with characteristics that render traditional sourcing approaches ineffective. Poor data visibility, low volume, time sensitivity, unique and often unstable specifications — just to name a few. And what’s more, apart from the natural dearth of contracted suppliers, non-compliance and maverick buying often lurk here.

In contrast to abstruse conceptual and theoretical frameworks, S.T.A.R Procurement brings field-tested methodologies to bear on tail spend — proven methodologies that bring real results. Our approach to tail-spend management is iterative and leverages our industry-leading strategic sourcing and transaction management capabilities, and proprietary tools, to deliver sustainable results:

• Billions in tail spend managed for leading global enterprises
• Unmatched track record of success, measured in hard dollars
• State-of-the-art, artificial intelligence-based spend analysis and sourcing tools
• RFQ templates, sourcing methodologies and category best practices
• Rapidly expanding global supplier database
• Highly flexible e-catalogue platform
• Unrivalled category expertise and transaction management capabilities

Why S.T.A.R Procurement

Our tail-spend management methodologies can be custom-configured to your organization’s existing processes, organisation, and systems nuances. And they’re designed to rapidly deliver sustainable positive cash flow — so you start seeing savings fast.

Spend Analysis: Cleansing and classification of data from a variety of source systems using our state-of-the-art spend analysis tool to identify the true tail spend.

Filtering: Deep-dive analysis within the tail spend to reclassify the tail and identify appropriate strategies to tackle the spend at a category or supplier level.

Sourcing: Accelerated execution of identified opportunities that includes bringing tail-spend purchases into the purview of existing contracts and leveraging S.T.A.R Procurements knowledge base of category data, RFQ templates and RFx/Auction tools for faster sourcing.

Ongoing Spot Buys: A highly efficient “buy desk” to extract value from each purchase at the point of requisition — these teams use a variety of tools and methodologies to balance cost savings and business criticality for every purchase.

Tail Spend Reduction: Reducing maverick buying at source by implementing online and punch-out catalogues, P-cards and improved compliance reporting.

Our tail-spend management programs are designed, managed, and executed by experienced procurement professionals. We hit the ground running from Day One.