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In contrast to direct procurement, indirect spend includes everything that goes into running a business that isn’t directly tied to the end product, such as maintenance, repairs, and operations (MRO), marketing, facilities, consumables, fleet, freight, travel and IT. Although it can make up as much as 50% of a company’s total purchases, it doesn’t often get the attention it should. The problem with ignoring indirect spend, however, is that you could be missing out on...

We recently held a webinar with Spend Matters about ways procurement organizations can put a stop to spend leakage. Before explaining how to stop it however, it is important to define what it is – and why traditional definitions may not be enough. Read on or watch the short clip below to learn about some common definitions of spend leakage from our Chief Strategy Officer, Steve Griffiths, and our VP of Automotive Practice, Amarish Kapadia! ...

Last week, we joined Chief Procurement Officers, heads of indirect, and maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) category managers from top 500 manufacturing companies, as well as the world’s most innovative startups at ProcureCon MRO in Atlanta. It was a great chance to soak up a wealth of MRO-related knowledge from industry experts, as well as share our own. Read on to get our day-by-day takeaways. Day 1 Some of the common themes from the day,...

Many organizations struggle with poor procurement spend visibility or lack it completely. Think about the old adage, “you can’t control what you can’t measure,” and you’ll realize that this is an ongoing challenge with large enterprise organizations. Without visibility into what your organization is spending, you have no way to control it. The top, and the most obvious, reason why most organizations struggle with spend management and compliance is that the majority of procurement spend...

Xeeva welcomes this guest post from Matthew York, Senior Research Analyst, Ardent Partners. For the past two decades, the modern manufacturing facility has become highly automated, employing robots to assemble automobiles and other large and complex consumer goods – sometimes without any direct human intervention (i.e., “lights-out manufacturing”, a hallmark of Industry 4.0). But as these robots and robotically-driven assembly lines age, they need regular maintenance, repair, and operating (MRO) services and supplies. Service calls must...

We recently had the opportunity to chat with Charlotte de Brabandt, Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM) 30 Under 30 Rising Supply Chain Stars 2017 Megawatt Star and member of ISM’s Thought Leadership Council. During our discussion, we chatted about the impact of technology on the future of procurement, and how to prepare for these inevitable changes. Check out a snippet from our interview below, and you can also listen to the full 30-minute audio interview here! XEEVA:...

During a recent webinar, our Chief Strategy Officer, Steve Griffiths, shared a simple 3-step process for identifying maverick spend. Read on or watch the short clip below to learn what this process is! If you want to learn more about maverick spend, you can watch the full webinar here!   Related: Why is maverick spend a problem for procurement organizations (and when is it not)? In a traditional way, if you want to get your hands around...

Hugo Evans, Vice President at A.T. Kearney, recently joined Vikas Shah, our SVP of Growth & Business Development, and Marisa Pierron, our Customer Success Manager, for a webinar about how emerging technology is impacting procurement. One of the key points they touched on during their discussion was specific areas of procurement organizations that will be affected by emerging technology. Want to find out more? Watch this clip or read the transcript below, and make sure you...

We recently held a webinar featuring Hugo Evans, Vice President at A.T. Kearney, Vikas Shah, our SVP of Growth & Business Development, and Marisa Pierron, our Customer Success Manager, in which they discussed the impact that emerging technologies are having on procurement. Watch the full webinar to learn more, but for a sneak peek, check out this short clip or read the transcript below!   VIKAS: How do you see emerging technology changing the landscape of...

We recently held a webinar in which our Chief Strategy Officer, Steve Griffiths, and Institute for Supply Management's (ISM) Managing Director of Global Operations, Lane Burkitt, discussed the impact technology is having on maverick spend. One of the points they touched on during their discussion was why maverick spend can be such a problem for procurement organizations – and in what instances it’s not a problem. Want to know more? Watch this clip or read...

In our recent webinar with Institute for Supply Management (ISM), Lane Burkitt, ISM’s Managing Director of Global Operations, and our Chief Strategy Officer, Steve Griffiths, talked about ways technology can eliminate maverick spend. To learn more, check out this clip or read the transcript below (and if you haven’t checked out the webinar yet, click here to watch the whole thing)!   Both of you have mentioned a lot about technology and how it's shaping...

Recently, we co-hosted a webinar with Institute for Supply Management (ISM), and it was full of great insights! ISM’s Managing Director of Global Operations, Lane Burkitt, chatted with our Chief Strategy Officer, Steve Griffiths, about how technology is solving one of the biggest challenges that procurement organizations deal with: maverick spend. One of the highlights of the webinar was their discussion about the reasons why maverick spend occurs. Watch the informative clip or read the...

If you work in indirect procurement, you’re definitely familiar with the problem of imperfect procurement data. Data that’s “imperfect” is unstructured, incomplete, or inaccurate, and is a result of any number of factors – including multiple ERP systems that don’t communicate with each other, widespread locations that operate independently, and people not following the correct process. When you have imperfect data, it’s impossible to accurately understand how your organization is doing or discover ways you...

In the first two chapters of our tale, we explained how to differentiate AI from the buzzword and explored how the state of AI is currently only at a basic level. But not all artificial intelligence is created alike. More advanced AI, the kind that can deliver real results for your organization, is more than just a fairy tale. Going beyond helpful Of course, any kind of AI is capable of helping you. Automation can...

It seems that these days, you can’t go anywhere without hearing about artificial intelligence (AI). It really is one of the hottest buzzwords right now. But as we looked at in the previous chapter of our tale, a lot of the buzz around artificial intelligence is nothing more than that: a whole lot of noise. Lots of tech companies claim their products have AI. However, most are only using it at the most basic level,...

We’ve all fallen victim to flashy marketing that makes big promises but doesn’t deliver on them (and often doesn’t provide any results at all). Remember the Shake Weight that everyone thought would give them toned arms with minimal effort? That just made you look ridiculous. Or the blanket that promised to save your marriage? That didn’t work, and now it’s collecting dust in your linen closet. Or what about the electric grill that claimed to...

ISM 2018 in Nashville, TN was a whirlwind of an event! Thousands of supply chain management professionals spent last week at the Institute for Supply Management’s annual conference, encompassed with 4 days of educational sessions, 2 days of intriguing vendor exhibitions, having hundreds of inspiring conversations, and building countless relationships. From speakers like Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, to Dan Bartel, chief procurement officer at ABB, the conference was full of highly informative...

Decisions, goals, and opportunities are all part of any journey. The path you take to reach each of those is important. What matters more though is where you start. That’s what determines if you will make it or not. Every part of life has a foundation that without, it would come crumbling down. For people, it’s oxygen. For cell phones, it’s a charged battery. If either of those were taken away, how long would you...

In Gartner’s recent annual report, they discuss their predictions as to what will have a great impact on procurement and sourcing technology in the coming year and how the market will change over time. One thing that is definitely clear – the procurement and sourcing market is evolving quickly as technology continues to advance. The summary of the report suggests that CPOs, IT leaders, and procurement organizations need to “plan for the impact of virtual...

Senior management’s top priority remains the same – drive value for the business. And while indirect procurement manager’s feet are held to the fire to achieve cost reduction targets and improve productivity, many struggle because they are still using outdated tools and technology. Alternatively, for end users, their focus is simply to get their job done right, and as quickly and easily as possible. By applying new technology, insights, and thinking to the challenge of...

It’s no mystery why indirect spend is often ignored. By its sheer nature, optimization has proven to be incredibly challenging. Unlike direct materials which are often highly engineered, associated with a specific set of approved suppliers, and controlled precisely through ERP and MRP technologies, indirect spend is comprised of a highly fragmented group of suppliers that vary by business unit (BU) and plant. These suppliers represent 1000s of sub-categories of goods and services and are...

Technology innovations, especially those driven by advancements in consumer buying, social technology, and big data management, can now be applied to pull together the complex web of suppliers, intangible deliverables, and inconsistent pricing and processes of indirect spend. These readily available technologies can meaningfully simplify the buying experience while optimizing other aspects of indirect spend cost such as supplier fees, terms and conditions, performance specifications, and performance management. If executed correctly, optimizing indirect spend adds...

Are your finance operations bogged down in paper and invoice processing delays? Today, as we pause to consider Earth Day, one way that procurement and finance organizations can make a positive impact on conservation and waste reduction is to move to eInvoicing, or paperless invoicing. According to research from Hackett Group, SharedServicesLink.com and others, large organizations process over 10,000 invoices annually per A/P FTE. This is a massive amount of paper. In real terms: 10,000...

Are you prepared for a successful procurement transformation? As procurement organizations become increasingly more strategic, many struggle to fully understand how their current procurement operations rate relative to operational and financial benchmarks. Even those that do understand what “good" looks like still have to perform a gap analysis, develop their vision and strategic roadmaps, and then deploy the right resources to execute the plan. "Many organizations struggle to understand how their procurement operations rate." At Xeeva,...

Most folks that don’t know e-procurement will think of it simply as purchasing necessary goods and services in the most cost-effective manner. However, what most don’t think about is the importance of the buying experience (much more than making it Amazon-like) and the specifics that go on behind the scenes. When using e-procurement for the P2P process, buyers (requesters) rely heavily on the accuracy of the catalogs to provide the most informed information. They also...

We're in the home stretch now... The spend under management (SUM) framework provides executives with a simple outcome-based model to drive the necessary changes in their organization to capitalize on the significant savings opportunities available to most organizations. The benefits of moving to best-in-class under the SUM framework include: Alignment of indirect spend objectives with core financial metrics  Defines and details actual spend at a granular level utilizing robust spend analytics Defines enterprise objectives by...

In our last post. we discussed adopting spend under management (SUM) and the first of five principles. Here are the other four: 2) Purchase through a formalized requisition to purchase order approval process. The purchasing processes of an organization should be governed by policies and procedures that are complete and enforced universally. Simply having them in place is a starting point but the key issue is enforcement. Are all the spend areas incorporated? Does my...

So now that you know what spend under management (SUM) is, how would you go about adopting such a framework? SUM is built on creating a partnership between indirect procurement and operations along five key operating principles across sourcing, contracting, buying, and spend decision-making. At its foundation is executive leadership with joint operating targets established between indirect procurement and the operating groups they support. The actual SUM model measures the maturity of the organization across...

Ever wonder why many companies view indirect procurement as a non-strategic back office function? Maybe it’s that indirect practitioners often focus too narrowly on measuring cost savings from indirect spend sourcing initiatives and lose sight of how those initiatives impact core financial metrics such as total cost of ownership (TCO), operating profit, working capital, and cash flow, among others. Therefore, adopting a well-structured indirect spend management framework that establishes that connection can bring real value...