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 survive? For indirect procurement, that foundation is the data. Without your procurement data, you don’t really know what is going on. How can you make proper business decisions if you’re merely making guesses or assumptions? It’s simple – you can’t! The entire source-to-settle process can only grow and get stronger if you start with the data.

Take control of your procurement data.

If you lack control of your procurement data, you will likely experience issues or problems. These challenges typically arise simply due to not having good data. What causes bad data? Quite a few things can:

• Too many people trying to control spend
• No clear standards in naming, structure, or classification
• Having a large number of parts, services, and suppliers
• Data quality is poor, incomplete, or contains errors
• Utilizing multiple platforms, systems, and approaches

These are just a handful of examples that can cause you to have bad data, but it’s important to recognize if your organization suffers from any of them. If you are, you’re probably not getting the full picture of what’s happening with your spend and you should take action to resolve it by taking better control of your procurement data.

Download the full whitepaper and learn how to take control of your procurement data now.

There are 3 key steps required to get started with your procurement data:

1. Access – knowing where data is stored, in what systems, and having the appropriate permissions to access it
2. Understanding – will allow you to identify trends, improve performance, develop new policies, and make informed decisions
3. Management – ensures that you’re not missing any necessary information to manage the data correctly

Related: Our take on Gartner’s 2018 predictions for procurement and sourcing technology

It’s not enough to make business decisions using any old procurement data that might be laying around. If your beautiful dashboard is showing the wrong data or your spend budget is created based on old spend data, that doesn’t really help you make the best decisions for your organization. You need to make sure that you’re using good data, data that is up-to-date, and most importantly, the right data. So how do you get the right data?

AI-driven technology can help.

It can be challenging to figure out how and where to start with your procurement data. That’s where advanced, AI-driven technology can be extremely beneficial. AI-driven technology, like our source-to-pay software, can help cleanse and categorize unstructured data, provide detailed visibility into spend, streamline processes, and uncover opportunities that were previously hidden. Increased awareness into your procurement data lets your AI learn more about the context as more high-quality data is added and provides you with improved insights and results. And nothing’s better than saving money, right?

Learn how to save by checking out the full whitepaper on getting started with your procurement data here.