Knowledge base Go From Tactical to Strategic Procurement with Insight.

By Insight Editor / 14 Oct 2020

The most effective procurement teams leverage analytics to create strategic sourcing strategies that enable innovation and provide measurable savings. Technology investments often make up a significant portion of overall budgets. Having robust, high-quality and on-demand sourcing data is critical to maintaining technology credibility, influence and transparency across the organization. IT is no longer an extension of the business, but is becoming the business – and it is critical to lead change with actionable and tactical strategies from accurate data. When you have full confidence and clear insights, you can drive savings and enable transformation at the speed of business.

Insight will revolutionize the way you analyze spend by providing just-right visibility to any of your users. Anything that can be measured can be optimized and effective cost control is a shared responsibility within your business. Gain visibility into your procurement activities with various tools in your myInsight account such as reports and dashboards.

Get data delivered your way.

When you optimize your supply chain with Insight, your procurement functions evolve from simply transactional to tactical activities that support business goals. Get the visibility you need into critical data – delivered your way.

Browse through a collection of interactive dashboards that visualize spend data and trends. Start at a high-level and view your overall year-to-date spend. Breakout the data into other groupings to instantly uncover more purchasing information by category, vendor, region, country, currency or another custom dimension.

Explore a full suite of standard reports that will meet most if not all of your data analysis needs. Access data for the last three years that can be emailed, downloaded, scheduled or posted to your account. Powerful filtering enables you to slice and dice your data as granularly as you want to see it. Narrow down your spend to sub-category levels and send to other team members in various shareable print-ready formats including PDF, Excel, CSV and FTP. Incorporating custom fields and variables into your spend data gives you the insights you need drive strategic sourcing plans.

Reports that provide clarity to control costs.

More professionals are being tasked to do more with less. We understand that this goes beyond just delivering savings. You need the resources to manage the operations of today while simultaneously investing in future innovation. Effective cost management gives you greater insight into where you’re making your technology investments and helps you identify new opportunities. We know that supply chain optimization means continuously improving how you purchase technology by turning data into tactical actions. In addition to having safeguards within our procurement platform to control maverick spending and reduce costs, you’ll discover a series of reports created to help you maximize value.

Spend analysis

A myInsight account lets you collect and organize all of your spend data in one place so you can identify and isolate factors that will positively impact how you spend with reports such as:

Snapshot
Overall sales history
Total sales by year and month

Cost of ownership

Less obvious ways to deliver cost savings is assessing the total costs related to acquiring technology products and services so you can better quantify and improve ROI. Some reports we offer to help you are:

Product totals by account and shipping location
Detail by account
Ad-hoc reports with custom fields

Purchase history

Knowing what, when and how you make technology purchases is just as important as determining the budget for why you need to make them to begin with. Examples of reports available include:

Purchase summary by items purchased
Purchase summary by manufacturer
Purchase summary by shipping location

Reports that drive investment diversity.

While category management does offer cost savings and increased compliance; another benefit is maximizing value and efficiency by monitoring your diversity of spend. Enriching your data with an additional layer focused on diversity enables you to gain more negotiation power with your preferred manufacturers and easily identify areas to make investments in that prevent your technology from becoming outdated. Working with Insight means you’ll gain a partner who’ll create a strategic roadmap of what technology at your company looks like in the future. Knowing where you are today compared to where you want to be, gives you the ability to report on your progress and measure on-going success.

Vendor diversity

Our vendor-agnostic platform gives you the freedom to leverage benefits from any manufacturer to fit the unique needs of your business. Turn relationships into strategic outcomes with reports such as:

Top manufacturer summary
Product totals by manufacturer

Product diversity

Create the optimum balance in where technology investments are being made and ensure alignment between purchases and overall business goals. Recognize product opportunities faster with these reports:

Product type summary by manufacturer
Purchase summary by item type

Reports that improve accuracy and compliance.

Contract visibility is critical to business planning and operations. We understand that most organizations don’t have the resources in-house or threshold to handle non-compliant spend analysis. You need the ability to easily validate that your orders are being purchased and invoiced at your negotiated contract price. Plus, as contracts expire, you need to know ahead of time. Your myInsight account lets you forecast or analyze spend trends within a given timeframe from a high-level or down to line item detail. Gain a comprehensive contract visibility solution that keeps your assets secure, compliant and ensures contracted pricing is applied.

Invoice information and history

Easily reconcile expenditures by location, cost center, general ledger codes or other custom data. Validate spend at every stage in the purchasing cycle with invoice reports including:

Open orders
Invoice summary
Invoiced orders

Compliance and license management

Effectively track software licenses and analyze robust sets of data that include publisher details, spending trends and renewal information with the following reports:

Software license contract summary
Software detail data
Software renewal

Reports that help you optimize processes

Having a decentralized procurement process increases errors, risk and magnifies weaknesses. Insight’s procurement platform is designed to align your people with your processes and provide a central base camp where smarter technology investments begin. Streamlined workflows increase the efficiency of your team and frees up internal resources to focus on automation and innovation. Our team of procurement experts will help you migrate existing process into the platform or create new workflows that improve productivity – all while giving you the tools you need to report on your activities. Use ad-hoc and custom reports to analyze almost any data set, examples include:

User level behavior such as adoption or compliance
Workflow timelines so you can identify efficiencies
Any client-defined fields to add internal context
And many more

Why is Insight the smart choice for procurement intelligence?

With over 30 years of experience in IT, we’ve worked hard to refine our reporting capabilities. Our full suite of reports gives you analysis-ready data – whenever you need – so you can have strategic sourcing discussions. Gain credible insights into all of your procurement activities that are universally recognized for accuracy. Are you a global or multi-site enterprise? Our reporting engine can handle processing information no matter how complex. Choose Insight for greater visibility into your IT spend so that you can run your business smarter.