All eyes on spend management as the CFO’s office is up for rehaul
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Key Takeaways
⇨ Spend management is crucial for maintaining organizational efficiency by managing purchasing and supplier relationships while reducing costs and increasing value.
⇨ Businesses face significant challenges in spend management, including resistance to change, legacy processes, lack of policy compliance and difficulties in gaining real-time visibility.
⇨ SAP provides solutions like SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass to enhance procurement insights and manage external workforce strategies, supporting businesses in achieving greater control and resilience.
Spend management is like the invisible thread that keeps all elements of running an organization in check. It involves managing various aspects of a company’s purchasing and supplier relationships, with a set of practices implemented to help manage spending to increase value and reduce costs.
However, facilitating a truly insightful spend management system is not a given, especially as businesses often struggle to gain valuable knowledge to act on. For instance, a 2024 Payhawk study which surveyed over 100 US and UK senior professionals in more than 11 industries found that the top challenges for organizations include resistance to change (25%) and inefficient and/or legacy processes (24%). These were closely followed by a lack of policy compliance, multiple disconnected tools and screen switching, lack of visibility in real-time and insufficient resources and spend data.
As part of its journey to help deliver actionable results, PwC integrates industry-specific business-process insight with technical knowledge of SAP solutions.
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With robust spend management being placed on a pedestal across businesses, SAP hosted its global Spend Connect Live event in October in Las Vegas and online to help users manage their sources of spend for increased control and business resilience.
Some options that have historically helped active users in this field develop a deeper understanding of spend include SAP Ariba solutions for direct and indirect spend and SAP Fieldglass solutions for external workforce management.
SAP Ariba specifically focuses on delivering the procurement insight and infrastructure to help take on business challenges. It also aims to deliver a simple experience for employees to collaborate with suppliers globally – bringing savings to procurement and innovation to the business.
In turn, as a vendor management system, SAP Fieldglass helps execute external workforce strategies for an agile and resilient external workforce to align service providers and contingent workers with the desired business results. It also assists by opening the doors to extra insight, control and savings across assignment management, contingent workforce management, services procurement and worker profile management.
As technological advancements proliferate organizations to address their most pressing issues, more businesses can be seen investing effort to leverage smarter business solutions to reimagine their strategic priorities, including the office of the CFO and the organization’s most valuable financial functions.
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