Whether it is conducting a simple spend analysis, developing savings strategies or building your sourcing roadmap, automated spend analysis will provide information crucial to the success of your business. If you’re looking for inspiration to get your automated spend analysis started – or finished – you’ve come to the right place.
1. “The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.” -Arthur C. Nielsen
The cost of spend visibility is a small price to pay for the value you receive. If you do not know how your business is performing, how will you know what opportunities you might be missing? Don’t let your data stay hidden in the dark. Investing in data and spend analytics will put your real-time data to work and reveal a classified powerhouse of information and insight.
2. “Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web… like deer on a freeway.” -Geoffrey Moore
Without data your company is stuck. How will you measure performance? How will you create a strategy? You cannot answer these questions unless you have data to justify your past performance. If you have implemented an automated spend analysis tool, you must dive deeper and extract value from your data. Otherwise, you are left sifting through numbers with no purpose or valuable outcome.
3. “What gets measured, gets managed.” -Peter Drucker
You can’t manage something you can’t see. If you are not measuring your spend analytics, how will you manage or optimize your strategy?
4. “Data are just summaries of thousands of stories – tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful.” -Chip & Dan Heath
Conducting a simple spend analysis gives you data. What do the numbers tell you? In order to communicate to your audience, you need to create a story. Combining rational driven data with emotional insights will allow you to convey your story clearly and convincingly.
5. “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” -Albert Einstein, physicist
Not every piece of data is important. You need to be able to determine what data is extraneous and what is essential for your business. Paradoxically, there will be important data that you will be unable to collect and measure. Fortunately, with new technology always on the horizon, we are always finding new ways to extract the data we need.
6. “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” -W. Edward Deming
Knowing how to ask the right question is just as critical as discovering new data. Why? Because if you do not know how to formulate a question that will yield the results you are looking for, you may end up with unusable data, or even worse, data that leads your story down the wrong path.
7. “The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.” -John Tukey
The value of imagery cannot be underestimated. The ability to visualize data can make different data elements stand out that may have never done so otherwise. Data visualization also makes it easier for you to tell your story via infographics, videos, and charts. This form of automated spend analysis will reduce the amount of words and numbers your audience needs to process, lessening the risk of confusion or misinterpretation.
What story does your data tell? Find out how Spend Radar can increase your spend visibility and enhance your data visualization with reporting. Have two minutes? Watch this quick automated spend analysis demo.
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