4Spend
4Spend is an always on procurement intelligence service that comes with embedded procurement expertise that allows you to take smarter & faster decisions.
Key features
Always on fully automated spend & supplier management. Our solution allows clients to leverage our previous engagements as well as our own deep procurement expertise.
Our aim is to deliver technology that enables the procurement professional. We do this by embedding procurement expertise that reduces the resources needed to completely optimise third party spend
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It is a capital mistake to theorize without having data.
Back when we started, the tool of choice for spend analysis were pivot tables. Much relied on experience, intuition and how good a person was with manipulating data in excel. With each new person came a new set of technical skills, priorities, perceived opportunities. Consistency was low and there was no refined principles that you could apply to reliably uncover opportunities.
Even now the lexicon of spend analytics remains a poor one. Tail Analysis, ABC Analysis, Category Analysis. All of these fall under the umbrella of “spend visibility”. None of these answer the question: “So what?” because all of these analyses are top down; sophisticated analytics are bottom up. Where the insights & opportunities come to you rather than the other way around.
This is journey we have embarked on for the last three years evolving our understanding of spend analytics, performing diagnostic after diagnostic and seeing what metrics actually lead to uncovering benefits. Moving from an output that is purely descriptive to one that is prescriptive, insightful and reliable.
Our 4Spend dashboards offer the distilled expertise of scores of procurement professionals embedded into the using algorithms and machine learning to accelerate the process and deliver results effortlessly and consistently, as well as automating huge parts of admin around spend reporting and management.
As far as we’ve come we still aren’t satisfied. Every day our data science team continue to unlock new insights and completely new forms of analyses which we implement and test on each engagement.
- CPO/CFO– What’s happening in your business? Are you going to hit your budget?
- Category Manager – What’s the health of your categories? What’s your category strategy?
Buyer/Analyst – What insights can you use to generate savings opportunities & negotiation levers?
How does it work?
A minimum of two years spend data is typically loaded into 4Spend.
We have replaced thoughtful heuristics with algorithms, to automate analysis and solutions at a quicker pace than your current system. Operating at this speed will not only save you time, but allow you to make effective, smarter decisions.
The technology is embedded with procurement expertise to categorise spend using machine learning through a friendly interface. This process involves supplier normalisation and classification of high transaction suppliers, with up to 70% of total transaction lines classified using this software.
Our team of category management experts are continuously evolving this technology in 4Spend. We have manually classified over 100,000s rows of training data into a procurement taxonomy. The taxonomy standardises the diagnostic approach and acts as a baseline to measure improvements and provide trustworthy data to make strategic led decisions
The technology landscape in procurement analytics is changing. Using expertise and the latest market research we promise to provide you solutions faster, cheaper and ultimately better.
- Category Assist
- Spend Categorization
2 differentiating components
- Rapid categorisation
- People consider this work beneath them – as a result, it is disregarded and not considered important.
- Generalisations, trivialising – only people who can make these are highly skilled people
- Category assist
Testimonials
