White Papers: A Practical Take on Spend Analysis
When you think as much about spend analysis as we do, you're bound to be
opinionated. We've made many of our opinions available in this series of brief
and easy-to-understand white papers. If you find yourself nodding along, you may
want to join our community of delighted BIQ customers.
Our viewpoint is rooted in years of sourcing consulting experience, starting
at McKinsey in the late '80's, and brought to practice at The Mitchell Madison Group
in the mid 90's. We built BIQ as a reaction to the incorrect thinking that has
crept into this space in recent years — for example, the notion that spend analysis
is a data warehouse application. That notion is wrong. We elaborate in
Data Warehouses Disappoint.
Consider also that after the low-hanging fruit is harvested from your first
spend dataset, you'll want to build dozens of other datasets for commodity-specific and other analyses.
It's just not possible to drag around the overhead of a data warehouse, an external server,
vendor services personnel, and so on,
every time you want to build a new cube. We discuss further in
One Spend Cube Is Never Enough.
We've also opined on some other controversies in this space. For example,
we believe it should not only be easy to add new dimensions and related data,
but it should also be easy
to transform data from different accounting systems into a common format. This "magic"
is usually performed by expert vendor personnel, using ad hoc tools. With BIQ, business
users don't have to be dependent on outside experts. They can build data transforms
and repeatable processes by themselves, with point-and-click tools. Read more
in
Practical Solutions for Multiple Accounting Systems.
The complete list of white papers is on the left. No "registration" is required to read them; we encourage
you to send along your own
thoughts and opinions.
