Some organisations spend as much as 60 percent of revenue to acquire the goods and services necessary to conduct business. Given this number, the pressure being felt by procurement professionals to reduce spending is hardly surprising. But how is it possible to reduce supplier spend while simultaneously improving supplier relations and collaboration?

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The answer is a strategic sourcing system that provides the information to let procurement departments:

Create complete spend transparency. Develop a comprehensive, accurate profile of the supplier base. Identify opportunities for optimal sourcing of materials, equipment and services. Consolidate and prioritise suppliers based on quality, performance and on-time delivery. Ensure contract compliance and reduce maverick spending. Ensure the quality of purchased items. Ensure appropriate levels of supply.

With SAS Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), procurement departments can gain a better understanding of their purchases, suppliers and performance in order to make better strategic sourcing decisions. Using this comprehensive solution, companies can reduce enterprise spend, consolidate and prioritise suppliers, reduce supplier risk and align procurement strategies with corporate goals.

SAS delivers supplier intelligence through an integrated set of data management and analytic applications that work with existing operational data and systems to gather, analyze and leverage all aspects of supplier data and purchasing history, thereby optimizing strategic sourcing and achieving significant cost savings.

Consisting of four fully integrated components, SAS Supplier Relationship Management allows you to maintain the flexibility you need to focus on your greatest pain today and then expand into other areas of improvement:

SAS Sourcing Data Quality provides accurate, detailed, comprehensive information to help you reduce commodity spend without increasing risk. SAS uses repeatable, automated coding based on industry standards and can readily accept any classification system. Normalise your supplier information for more accurate measurement. Leverage third-party information for supplier enrichment and ensure your suppliers are accurately and consistently named.

SAS Spend Analysis helps you reduce enterprise spend across suppliers and commodities by providing increased visibility into procurement information. With it you can leverage corporate buying power for cost-savings and identify ways to buy more effectively from valued suppliers. SAS Spend Analysis also lets you perform weighted supplier ranking using the criteria most important to you, helping you evaluate which suppliers are best suited for your company's needs.

SAS Procurement Scorecard helps you set, measure and manage procurement strategies that are aligned with corporate goals based on information from all the procurement systems throughout the enterprise. You can create and maintain scorecards for individual suppliers and the entire procurement organisation, measuring performance against procurement-specific KPIs. These capabilities help you reduce total spend and supplier risk, and ensure supplier quality, on-time-delivery and performance.

SAS Sourcing Strategy uses operations research techniques to add balance and flexibility to the supplier evaluation process. It employs user-defined business rules to narrow your list of suppliers and recommend how much to spend with each one to best achieve your procurement goals.

For more information on Supplier Relationship Management?

• Download the analyst report "Best Practices in Spending Analysis: Cure for a Corporate Epidemic".