Today on the pod I am joined by David Bush, formerly of IASTA and Determine, and now Chief Revenue Officer for spend analytics specialist SpendHQ.
It has been a year since I first met David, and so his appearance on the Art of Procurement is long overdue!
I invited David onto the show discuss the topic of spend analytics. Spend analytics have always been a bit of a pain for me – I have spent a lot of time playing with pivot tables and searching Google to try and categorize suppliers which leads to lots of errors and a lot of time invested!
But I know that it doesn’t have to be like that.
I invited David on to the show to hear his advice on the steps that procurement leaders can take to gain greater visibility into supplier spend, which is the foundation of robust procurement strategies.
“When you get access to good spend data, you’re still not leveraging all it’s value until you can democratize it across the organization. You don’t want it pigeon-holed into 2 or 3 people who are just pushing out reports to category managers or once every 3 years to go source something.”
In this episode, you will learn:
- David’s approach to building a personal network and how it came into play in his transition to SpendHQ.
- The importance of human interaction in business.
- How to apply an entrepreneurial mindset to a career mindset.
- What to look for when assessing culture when considering your next career move.
- Some of the basics of spend analytics and the building of a spend analytics capability.
- How the market and capabilities of spend analytics are evolving and what procurement leaders can expect from them.
- Is poor spend visibility still a big problem or do most companies have a basic capability and now just looking to take things to the next level?
- What good spend analysis and analytics looks like today.
- Custom taxonomies vs Crowd-sourced taxonomies
- Recommendations that a procurement leader can follow to begin the whole process from getting data, to cleansing it, to taxonomies and beyond.
- How often spend data should be refreshed and how to speed up the process.
- How much of your spend should be classified and what to do with the tail-spend.
- Key actions a procurement leader should take to increase spend visibility.
Links and Resources:
- Subscribe to the Art of Procurement podcast.
- David Bush on LinkedIn
- From the Corner Office to the Home Office – 5 Lessons Learned
- SpendHQ Resource Center – whitepapers and external analyst reports referenced in today’s show.
- SpendHQ Home Page
- SpendHQ Webinar: How to Navigate Your Spend Analysis Journey, November 14 2017
