How are you tracking the health of your company’s procurement?
Today’s post is from our SafeSourcing archive
Today, we will look at some of the principles of this dashboard and how you could be using them to help track the health of how your company spends its money.
Establish the baseline – One of the premises with which most dashboards work successfully is that of establishing where you are right now. Even better than that is being able to go back 1-2 years to see where you have come from. When you can go back over historical data, you can begin to establish the trends of how you have done and what areas need the most attention. If a category has consistently increased year after year, then you may need to source a different vendor or item. Other areas of the company can use this data, too, to determine if a total shift in products or raw materials should be used to get away from those made with material that continues to increase. The baseline will establish your health before you do anything else.
Pull from other sources – Often times, procurement departments do not have access to the best data they need to make decisions. This may be because it is held in systems they do not have access to or because the company itself has never had a process to track the details. By looking to outside sources, you may uncover data that is useful in making decisions, such as going to the suppliers you do business with and asking for historical performance for purchases or pricing. It could also mean that you research internally for data that isn’t dollars and cents. You may purchase material handling equipment, but the warehouse uses it. How the equipment holds up and runs and how the supplier supports you for fixes and replacement parts are just as important in determining your procurement health as is the cost of the equipment in a contract. The more data you have, the better choices you can make for the company.
Correlating Data Points – With data from several sources, you can put the final piece in play. Just like the new Apple Health Dashboard can correlate calories consumed from MyFitnessPal and burnt from MapMyRun, to the blood pressure measurements taken from an iHealth wireless device, you should be looking for solutions that can help correlate the key data points you are receiving from external and internal sources. When you correlate which resource runs projects quickly but with good savings you can begin to examine what they are doing differently than other team members, for instance. The correlations of savings and the time it takes to realize the savings is just one correlation we can provide.
At SafeSourcing, we can help your company establish a procurement dashboard to monitor your company’s spend health with our SafeDashboard™. For more information on this tool or on our “Risk Free” trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative. We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.
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