Spend analysis is the process to collect, classify and analyse spend data to identify savings opportunities, improve efficiency and ensure compliance. It’s often used as a starting point for procurement transformation, allowing you to track performance and measurably drive continuous improvement.
In this article, you’ll learn 14 ways to get actionable spend visibility faster and leverage it across your procurement transformation journey based on decades of experience leading spend analysis projects.
1. You don’t need perfect spend data
Getting from raw spend data to actionable information is not always easy. Many larger businesses operate with multiple ERP and procurement systems, requiring extensive work to automate data harmonization.
Many organizations believe they need perfect data before they can take action. That’s not true. Even with incomplete categorization, valuable insights can be derived from supplier or product data alone.
Suplari has successfully addressed these challenges at scale. Our prescriptive data model transforms raw data into something actionable by our AI, ensuring insights drive real impact. In most cases, you get descriptive insights and recommendations within weeks.
2. Don’t underestimate the challenge of data harmonization
Many businesses are first tempted to build out their spend analytics software in-house. They may see it as a solution that a centralized IT team can handle as a data management exercise.
Let’s be honest. Enterprise data integration is complex. Even within a single vendor, such as SAP, no two implementations are identical. Simply connecting data sources doesn’t solve the problem.
The real challenge is semantic mapping—ensuring spend data is harmonized and structured in a way that makes it actionable. We’ve worked extensively with large enterprises to navigate these challenges, ensuring data is not just collected but optimized for decision-making.
3. Don’t overestimate the value of data harmonization
Some customers initially seek only a normalization or categorization engine, believing that alone will make their spend data useful. However, without a strategy for turning that data into actionable insights, it remains underutilized.
Suplari helps organizations prioritize immediate actions while refining data quality over time to drive strategic decision-making. Our approach focuses on working backward from desired outcomes, ensuring every data initiative leads to measurable business impact.
4. You don’t need to build what you can buy
Some companies invest heavily in building and maintaining their own spend cubes or spend analysis dashboards, spending up to seven figures annually on dedicated teams to address user requests. In these cases, centralized analytics or IT teams often lack the expertise or resources to continuously refine analytics for business users.
More forward-thinking companies identify their use cases and then seek ready made solutions that replace the need for constant manual dashboard maintenance. Don’t underestimate the full cost of ownership required to make a spend analytics solution usable and actionable.
5. Static dashboards are dead
Dashboards for their own sake don’t help. Optimized views that align with specific goals do. Our platform guides users to their next best action through contextual analytics.
For example, if a category manager is reviewing a supplier, we highlight relevant opportunities—such as consolidation or cost-saving actions—directly within the interface. The workflow integrates prescriptive guidance, tracking progress, and quantifying outcomes, ensuring every action taken leads to measurable results.
6. Perfect spend classification doesn’t exist
No procurement executive is ever fully satisfied with their spend categorization. Suplari offers self-service categorization tools to continuously improve spend classification. We also challenge traditional thinking: Do you even need full categorization before acting?
In many cases, insights derived from supplier lists or product data alone can drive meaningful actions. We constantly seek ways to optimize for outcomes rather than adhering to rigid category management structures.
7. You don’t need a data lake
We sometimes hear from customers that IT teams prefer to have all their enterprise data in a data lake. Data lakes are valuable assets for large organizations, integrating procurement, finance, sales, and more into a single dataset.
However, just having a data lake doesn't drive outcomes. Your data needs to be integrated to a model that is actionable. You have to build easy-to-use products on top of it and enable your team to act on the data. Without that, it's just a repository.
8. You need to automate spend classification
A spend analysis dashboard alone doesn’t mean a company has effectively cataloged, combined, or made data actionable. Just throwing data into a harmonized spend repository solves nothing.
The last thing you want to add is more manual, routine workflows for your team when you need to classify more data over time. The key is modeling spend data into a structure that makes it usable and accommodates more automated spend classification over time.
Suplari automates much of this process for our customers, allowing them to access out-of-the-box analytics tailored for different user personas—category managers, sourcing managers, CFOs, and CPOs—without requiring deep training. This reduces reliance on expert analysts and ensures insights are immediately actionable.
9. Do background research on your team’s needs
If you want to transform the way your team works, you need to first understand the way they work. You have to go deep with your team because each spend category has different problems and execution patterns.
I’ve seen many internal analytics teams simply throw data at the wall, hoping something useful emerges. It usually doesn’t. The key is enabling your team to take action by providing packaged analytics in specific domains that are immediately actionable—rather than just offering a generic Tableau dashboard or pivot table that requires an expert to interpret.
Every piece of analytics should drive an impact, move toward a procurement KPI, and result in action. Many companies, especially those relying on centralized IT or business intelligence teams, fail to do this. Suplari has done extensive research with procurement professionals to understand the day-to-day needs of our users and build out-of-the-box capabilities that a pleasure to use, intuitive and drive immediate impact.
10. Priorize insights over analysis
At Suplari, we’ve worked extensively with our users, developed and improved our product based on feedback, and built out-of-the-box analytics that minimize cognitive overhead. For many procurement teams, spend analysis still happens today by emailing and tinkering around with endless pivot tables, taking hours of analysis time. Suplari eliminates the overhead of your team searching for projects and instead presents them the quantifiable opportunities that are read to execute with prescriptive actions.
One of our most popular features is Insights— intelligent agents that continuously scan data to find opportunities that yield measurable outcomes, such as savings, process improvements, supplier diversification, or risk mitigation. Each opportunity is quantified so users understand how taking action moves them toward their goals.
For example, one of our customers aimed to improve compliance by reducing the number of purchase orders created after the fact, which negatively impacted pricing consistency and supplier relations.
Identifying these POs was challenging since they were often hidden. We collaborated with the customer to leverage AI and detect signals in their data before these compliance issues occurred. As a result, they significantly reduced the percentage of POs created after the fact.
11. Find a solution that has high customer satisfaction
Suplari has the highest customer satisfaction scores of all spend analytics solutions in comparisons by analyst firms such as Gartner and Spend Matters. We think a part of the reason is because real procurement teams like to use the solution more actively across their day-to-day work. Here are a couple examples:
- Category manager - Many category managers want quick visibility into their areas of responsibility. Suplari provides a customizable category manager view, allowing them to filter data down to what’s most relevant. As they navigate categories and suppliers, they see contextual insights aligned with strategic initiatives—whether focused on risk, diversity, ESG goals, savings, or consolidation. Our case management system tracks execution, allowing users to demonstrate impact to executives.
- Procurement analysts - We automate much of the analyst’s traditional workload. Rather than manually pulling data from ERP systems into spreadsheets, Suplari eliminates these inefficiencies. Analysts no longer need to spend time building reports; instead, they can drive meaningful outcomes. Organizations relying on manual extract-and-analyze methods have a significant opportunity for optimization.
- Enterprise data analysts - In some businesses, spend analytics is supported by a data analyst or team. A common challenge we see is that data analysts are often tasked with identifying opportunities in unfamiliar domains. They may not fully understand the intricacies of specific categories, leading to inefficiencies. Suplari automates this by providing domain-specific insights that surface relevant opportunities without requiring deep domain expertise. AI enhances this process by learning and adapting to business needs over time.
12. Look for a solution that guides decision making
Beyond traditional spend analytics, Suplari agents continuously scan data to find patterns and opportunities. This removes the cognitive overhead of interpreting data manually.
Every insight is backed by packaged analytics to validate its legitimacy. Our goal is to optimize the entire workflow—from data interpretation to action to tracking measurable outcomes.
Analytics often function as a rearview mirror, but business processes are cascades. By analyzing early-stage signals, we can identify opportunities that impact future outcomes.
13. Understand how AI is used in spend analysis
Today, the use of artificial intelligence is table stakes in spend analytics. Most solution providers use some degree of machine learning in their spend classification engines. When you’re comparing different options, look for vendors that can provide decision intelligence in addition to spend intelligence.
Suplari’s AI-driven procurement analytics workflow learns and evolves, continuously improving decision-making processes over time. Our AI platform tracks KPIs and identifies actionable opportunities that drive execution toward goals.
14. Enrich and expand spend data over time
When you are driving transformational change, your ambitions should grow over time. Integrating additional datasets, such as CRM data with spend data, expands future opportunities.
Many of our customers are now identifying trade balance opportunities, inventory gaps, and pricing optimizations that would be invisible if they only examined spend data. Connecting these datasets enhances decision-making and business impact.
Our customers use a variety of enterprise systems—such as Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, NetSuite—and we ensure our platform focuses on optimizing data for procurement use cases. While some frameworks categorize analytics into backward-looking and forward-looking types, our priority is turning all data into actionable opportunities, regardless of its orientation.
Bottom line on building a spend analysis framework
At Suplari our focus is on delivering quantifiable, actionable opportunities rather than just another dashboard. This makes us the ideal spend analytics solution to use for procurement transformation.
Aligning spend analytics with KPIs, strategic initiatives, and measurable opportunities is what drives value. Some users may still prefer pivot tables, but our goal is to change the mindset—to provide solutions that allow the entire team, not just experts, to act on insights efficiently.
Our impact is seen in front-line work. Suplari enables category managers to move beyond just viewing data. We provide insights that allow them to take immediate action on pricing, supplier diversification, and cost optimizations. Instead of static reports, we deliver strategic opportunities that lead to real business outcomes.
Book a demo to see why Suplari is the customer favorite in spend analysis - and explore how we can help you on your procurement transformation journey.
About Suplari
Suplari is a procurement intelligence solution that helps businesses modernize procurement operations using AI. Suplari provides actionable intelligence to manage suppliers, deliver savings and manage compliance beyond the limits of traditional spend analytics. Suplari’s unique AI data management foundation empowers enterprise businesses to transform procurement operating models with reliable, AI-ready data.
Procurement spend analysis FAQs
How can you effectively analyze procurement spend?
Effective spend analysis starts with collecting data from ERP and procurement systems, but doesn't require perfect data to begin. Focus on automated classification using AI rather than manual categorization, prioritize actionable insights over exhaustive reports, and align analysis with specific business outcomes like cost savings or supplier consolidation. Suplari automates spend classification and provides prescriptive insights that guide teams toward immediate action. The key is moving beyond static dashboards to continuous, intelligent monitoring that surfaces quantifiable opportunities rather than requiring analysts to manually search through data.
What are the best procurement spend analysis software options available today?
Leading spend analysis software should offer automated AI-powered classification, integrate seamlessly with multiple ERP systems, provide role-specific analytics for category managers and executives, and deliver prescriptive insights rather than static reports. Suplari stands out with the highest customer satisfaction scores among spend analytics solutions according to Gartner and Spend Matters. Unlike traditional tools requiring constant manual maintenance, Suplari's AI agents continuously scan data to identify savings opportunities, compliance risks, and supplier consolidation possibilities—providing immediate time-to-value within weeks rather than months of implementation.
How does AI enhance procurement spend opportunity assessments?
AI transforms spend analysis from backward-looking reporting into proactive opportunity identification. Machine learning automates spend classification with 95%+ accuracy, while intelligent agents continuously scan data to surface quantifiable opportunities for savings, risk mitigation, and supplier optimization. Suplari's AI-driven Insights feature eliminates manual analysis by automatically detecting patterns like maverick spending, duplicate suppliers, and compliance issues. Rather than requiring analysts to build reports and interpret data, AI presents validated opportunities with prescriptive actions—enabling entire procurement teams to drive measurable outcomes efficiently without deep analytical expertise.
