Businesses everywhere should be taking a cue from those who are busy de-cluttering their lives this spring. While the season is most notoriously known for thoroughly cleaned houses and meticulously kept yards, companies, too, can benefit from this mindset by organizing their finances and addressing areas in need of improvement. Although this should be a common practice year-round, there's no better day than today, national "Be a Millionaire Day," to start.
Though no one is quite sure how or when this holiday began, May 20 is recognized as a day devoted to reevaluating expenses and identifying opportunities for savings. Businesses can take the first step in achieving savings by conducting a seven step spend analysis, which helps procurement and accounting professionals to identify the sources of spend data and analyze it to increase efficiencies, reduce expenses and enhance contract compliance. With valuable insight into where and how money is being spent within an organization, businesses can free up thousands (maybe millions!) of dollars being spent unnecessarily.
As the value of eProcurement is realized, more businesses can reap the rewards of streamlined processes and achieve both hard and soft savings:
- Hard savings represent the dollar amount saved as a result of the products and services purchased. While small purchases are often discounted and seen as the cost of doing business, efficient organizations must understand that these fractional savings can add up—fast. The right eProcurement solution will help keep costs low, while also providing greater visibility into purchasing power. By doing this, organizations can ensure that they're bringing more spend under control.
- Soft savings are the time savings achieved as a result of newly streamlined processes and implementation of easy-to-use technologies. By doing more with less, organizations can streamline their procurement operations to provide a greater level of service. For example, efficient eProcurement systems make sure that no one has to duplicate their work by keeping order information on file so details can be reused without administrators having to start from scratch each time.
SciQuest customer Bryn Mawr College has achieved both forms of savings. Plagued by limited visibility into spending and lack of a centralized purchasing process in place, the prestigious women's Liberal Arts College found that invoices weren't always getting to the purchasing department in time for prompt payment. Not only did Bryn Mawr miss out on critical supplier discounts as a result, but its lack of insight also prevented them from negotiating better contracts with suppliers.
Since implementing eProcurement from SciQuest, the college has gained greater insights into what it is buying and who it is buying from, with an online marketplace that assigns purchasing carts to administrative professionals who can see, modify and approve, what is being purchased. By taking a more strategic approach to contract negotiations, looking at ways to capitalize on spending patterns and finding ways to further decrease costs, the college is able to better identify savings opportunities.
While the odds of winning the lottery today are slim, organizations should use national "Be a Millionaire Day" as excuse to get inspired about streamlining their businesses—taking the time to identify efficiency gaps and uncover solutions that promise incredible savings.
How does your organization plan to save this spring? Join the conversation on Twitter at @SciQuest.