Procurement Productivity and Impact Up, Better Service for Customers and Suppliers

Lauri Vihonen
Feb 25
3 min read

Procurement analytics is one of the most important tools for improving an organization’s procurement function, achieving measurable savings, increasing efficiency, and enhancing collaboration with suppliers. However, for many organizations, implementing analytics is slow, expensive, and requires complex integrations. Now, there is an alternative that changes this landscape: Spendata.

Unlock Value with Spendata

The new Spendata procurement analytics tool has gained significant interest, and its adoption is growing. With Spendata, purchase, item, and performance analysis can be conducted with unprecedented speed and cost-effectiveness. It operates independently but can also be integrated with Power BI, allowing analytical results to be widely utilized in decision-making across the organization.

How Can Spendata Benefit Your Organization?

Spendata provides an agile and efficient way to leverage procurement data. It goes beyond analyzing past purchases and supports decision-making in tendering, contract management, and supplier relationships. Its key benefits include:

Improved Data Transparency and Quality

✅ All analyses and data processing steps are open and transparent.

✅ Analyses update in real-time and are immediately available.

✅ Reduces repetitive and manual reporting work, allowing resources to be focused on more impactful activities.

Enhanced Procurement Efficiency and Impact

✅ Streamlines analysis processes, eliminating redundant work and inefficiencies.

✅ Accelerates decision-making: analyses that previously took weeks are now completed in minutes.

✅ Helps demonstrate the value of procurement to management and stakeholders.

Increased Satisfaction Across All Levels

🔹 Customers: Receive better service and more insights to optimize consumption.

🔹 Procurement professionals: Less routine work, more time for impactful analysis.

🔹 Suppliers: Gain clearer insights and can enhance their services more effectively.

Who Can Benefit from Spendata?

Spendata is particularly useful for organizations where purchases, items, and services play a central role, such as:

• Public sector entities – municipalities, cities, regional authorities, and publicly owned procurement units.

• Manufacturing industry, particularly mid-sized industrial companies.

• Businesses and organizations looking to improve procurement analytics and decision-making.

Improving Produrement Productivity, Case Example: Three Stages of Procurement Development Using Item Level Analysis

Previously, I have written about the importance of speed in data-driven procurement. The following example illustrates how Spendata supports procurement analytics in three distinct phases:

Tracking Consumption and Identifying Trends

Analyzing purchases and consumption at the item and performance level by customer and supplier.
Identifying development objectives and needs based on data.
Utilizing supplier classification and category structures in analysis.

Tendering and Supplier Selection

Structuring tenders and forming pricing baskets.
Automatically generating price annexes for requests for proposals.
Enabling immediate bid comparison and supplier selection based on previous consumption.
Demonstrating procurement value and impact to stakeholders.

Operations during Contract Period

Monitoring and managing consumption during the contract period.
Analyzing supplier service levels and deviations.
Assessing and responding to price increase notifications.
Analyzing contract usage rates and identifying off-contract purchases.
Automating reporting and integrating data from multiple sources.

Integrating and Enriching Multi-Source Data

Behind all analytical phases is a unified and comprehensive data layer that integrates key procurement data from various sources. This ensures that information is easily accessible, combinable, and analyzable from different perspectives. The data layer includes essential analytics components, such as:

🔹 Items and item groups

🔹 Services and performance data

🔹 Orders and invoices

🔹 Receipts and delivery times

🔹 Unit prices and quantities

🔹 Usage and monitoring

🔹 Assortment management

The data layer connects different formats of data from multiple sources, enabling seamless integration into analytics and standard reporting environments. Data can be sourced from Power BI, Tableau, and other systems, ensuring smooth integration and easy accessibility across different platforms.

A Fast, Affordable, and Flexible Analytics Solution

Spendata complements Power BI and similar tools but offers unique features tailored for procurement analytics. Unlike traditional solutions, it does not lock users into a single vendor or system but allows for open and flexible data utilization. Data can be extracted from Power BI, enriched with additional insights, and seamlessly returned to it.

I have already implemented multiple procurement analytics projects using Spendata. Thanks to its flexibility, building analyses is fast and does not require complex deployment projects. Spendata enables procurement organizations to take their data-driven decision-making to the next level quickly and securely with minimal investment.