At NextLevel 2013, we had the opportunity to sit down with Jason Busch, executive editor and contributor of Spend Matters, and Brian Daniels, SciQuest’s VP of spend analysis. Here, Jason and Brian discuss the new era of spend analysis.

How does spend analysis become broader and tie into supply chain issues?

[pl_blockquote pull="right" cite="Jason Busch | Spend Matters"]I’m sitting next to the person here who’s probably one of the first to create what I will call data mashups of different types of procurement data, AP data, invoice data with other types of insights. So it could be around logistics and carrier performance. It could be diversity data, it could be risk data.

But as you begin to go even further than that and you look at inventory levels … as you look at vendor past performance all of a sudden you’re going far beyond the basic spend cube. And what’s really exciting about that to me, it’s not just procurement who’s the customer and gets you away from from the discussion of, “well spend analysis is just BI (business intelligence).” It’s not.

It’s definitely a procurement-centric view of the world, but the world is so much bigger than just invoice data and AP data. [/pl_blockquote]

[pl_blockquote cite="Brian Daniels | SciQuest"]When we came out with our spend analysis product back in 2009, in the back of our minds we were thinking about:  you know, we need to get broader inside the organization who want to get more data. We use the term and talked about bringing in more data.

At that time companies looked at us and said, “Whoa, we need to solve our first challenge which is understanding where the money’s going.” I think that we’re seeing kind of an end of that particular era. Where companies, most organizations have something that they understand where the money’s going, who their buying from. That kind of classic starting point for spend analysis. If that need is satiated, what we’re now seeing is, and we’re seeing it here at the NextLevel conference, two great examples of organizations that are bringing in global supplier performance data alongside your spend data. So it’s not just a spend management problem it’s a global supplier performance problems, global supplier performance visability issue. So we’re seeing more and more of these examples pop up.

Companies are coming to us saying, “we want to give you our claims data,” an insurance company. We want to give you our logistics data, want to get broader –  gain visibility across the organization in a much greater fashion. [/pl_blockquote]

[pl_blockquote pull="right" cite="Jason Busch | Spend Matters"]I think ultimately that’s representative of a world where we’re not just measuring costs or price variance but measuring value about what we buy, how we interact with our stakeholders, inspires and what is that value on a category basis of what is the value of AP (Accounts Payable) looks at relationships versus legal, versus operations, versus a business verses us in procurement? So measuring outcomes based on broader definitions of value versus just cause.  [/pl_blockquote]