You don’t have to look hard to find case studies showing impressive spend analysis results. What you can't often find are honest accounts of what it takes to get there.
Most procurement teams suffer from data integration challenges, the change resistance, the unexpected discoveries that might force you to rethink your procurement data management strategy entirely. This you won’t read about in glossy sales presentations.
BT Group, MediaNews, and Nordstrom each faced different obstacles on their path to spend analysis success. Their experiences give you practical insights that most case studies never reveal.
Differences in spend analysis approaches
If you’re looking to advance digitalization in your procurement team, you’ll understand the benefits and limitations of different kinds of spend analysis solutions better than most people.
Many businesses utilize either self-built spend visibility reports or spend analysis modules provided by their ERP or source-to-pay solution. While both options can be made to work, data-driven organizations increasingly seek dedicated procurement analytics software.
Most spend analysis software you’ll come across today still suffer from manual data aggregation, inconsistent categorization taxonomies, and static reporting cycles that lag business reality by weeks or months. These constraints prevent procurement organizations from executing strategic initiatives at the speed modern markets demand.
AI-powered spend analysis platforms like Suplari address these fundamental limitations through automated data ingestion, dynamic categorization engines, and real-time analytical capabilities. The end result is faster, more trustworthy spend visibility at enterprise scale.
When you’re evaluating spend analysis case studies, make sure you research both the outcome and the technology behind the story. Here are three concrete examples.
BT Group: From 35 ERPs to actionable insights in two clicks
BT Group, one of the world's largest telecommunications companies, manages over 10,000 suppliers across 35-40 ERP systems. When they reached out to Suplari in 2019, they wanted to fundamentally re-invent their corporate-wide procurement strategy and improve their bottom line through reduced spend and greater efficiency.
The procurement intelligence challenge
BT's procurement organization faced the classic enterprise problem: massive data volumes distributed across disparate systems with no unified way to analyze spending patterns or supplier performance. Their existing approach required significant manual intervention just to achieve basic visibility into category spend.
As Diarmuid O'Donoghue, Head of the Digital Garage at BT Sourced, explains: "We didn't want just a general spend platform that relayed spend information back to us. We really wanted something different."
What Suplari delivered for BT
BT selected Suplari's AI-powered platform because it could handle their complex, multi-entity procurement environment while delivering the speed and accuracy they needed.
Documented results and impact
The implementation delivered specific, measurable improvements:
- Speed and efficiency: O'Donoghue highlights the tool's impact on daily operations: "In essentially two clicks, your category manager can identify high-growth suppliers in a category or pinpoint POs raised against suppliers without a contract." This replaced processes that previously took hours of manual analysis.
- Cross-functional adoption: Suplari became accessible to the entire organization, serving thousands of employees beyond just procurement. This accessibility freed up the procurement team for more strategic work rather than responding to ad-hoc data requests.
- Strategic decision support: The platform's actionable insights enabled BT to make "quicker, smarter decisions," as O'Donoghue notes: "Decisions can slow any company up. We save time within procurement by having the ability to pull down those insights quickly."
- Predictive capabilities: Unlike typical spend analytics platforms that deliver historical reporting and dashboards, Suplari's machine learning automatically discovers savings opportunities and puts them directly in front of users. For BT, this AI-driven approach has driven significant growth in savings because business unit managers don't have to dig to find opportunities.
Looking for more inspiration: Explore 10 examples of AI-powered procurement in action from an interview with Cyril Pourrat, founder of BT Sourced and CPO of BT Group.
MediaNews Group: Filling critical gaps in media industry procurement
MediaNews Group, the third-largest newspaper group in the US, represents a unique case study in media industry procurement. As a leader in local, multi-platform news and information, they needed sophisticated spend analytics to support both cost management and revenue generation strategies.
Media industry procurement complexity
Jeff Ball, Head of Procurement at MediaNews Group, faced a common enterprise challenge: their ERP system's spend analytics capabilities were unsuitable for his objectives. The system required data to be exported for meaningful insights, creating inefficiencies that hampered strategic decision-making.
Ball needed a solution that could handle the unique spending patterns of media operations while providing the speed and flexibility required for strategic sourcing in a rapidly changing industry.
Suplari's role as spend analytics vendor
MediaNews Group chose Suplari specifically to fill the critical gaps their ERP couldn't address. As Ball explains: "Suplari serves as the spend analytics vendor for MediaNews Group, providing capabilities that our ERP tools currently lack."
The platform enabled more effective data analysis and procurement strategies by allowing stakeholders to understand "the latest supplier spend by category, business unit, payment method, and more."
Strategic procurement outcomes
After four years of using Suplari, Ball reports consistent value delivery:
- Comprehensive spend baseline: "When you think about building a comprehensive baseline of spend in your organization and being able to slice it and dice it very easily and very quickly, Suplari is the first phase of procurement's do, check, act cycle."
- User experience: Ball praises the platform's usability: "I love its UX. It's very easy to use, and they have a great dashboard that suggests sourcing opportunities. It's ground zero of my sourcing philosophy."
- Cost-effectiveness: After shopping around initially and continuing to evaluate options, Ball confirms: "Here we are four years later, and it's still the best fit, and it's a cost-effective tool."
- Spend variance analysis: The platform enabled MediaNews to identify significant cost discrepancies: "All of this comes from having the data at your disposal, at your fingertips, to be able to say, 'Why is this cluster of titles or business units paying 5X, 10X more for the same product and service that these clusters of titles are paying for?'"
- CFO understanding: Ball notes that financial executives quickly grasp Suplari's value proposition, understanding why it's "a best-in-class solution for spend analytics" compared to other enterprise software systems.
Nordstrom: Elevating procurement to strategic partnership
Nordstrom's retail spend analytics case study represents sophisticated procurement at scale, where spend analytics must support both operational efficiency and strategic supplier relationships across multiple channels and business units.
Retail procurement strategic requirements
When Karoline Dygas joined Nordstrom as Global Supply Chain Executive, she recognized the critical importance of having clear, actionable insights to drive change and create value within the organization. For a longstanding retail organization with complex supplier relationships, visibility was essential.
As Dygas explains: "In order to make change, you actually need to see what is going on. From that, we could then create our strategies and ultimately unlock the value in an organization that has been around for a long time."
Suplari's strategic enablement
Nordstrom required data that was actionable, repeatable, and easy to visualize to inform decisions. Suplari provided this capability, allowing them to analyze spend, identify supplier relationships, and uncover opportunities for strategic sourcing.
The platform enabled Nordstrom to address complex challenges like overly complex supply chains and single-sourcing risks through better visibility and analysis.
Transformational business impact
Nordstrom's implementation delivered multiple strategic benefits:
- Strategic positioning: "Suplari has been instrumental in elevating procurement to a more strategic level by providing actionable data and deep insights," according to Dygas.
- Real-time analytical capability: The team gained access to reliable, real-time data that they could "slice and dice in various ways," enabling meaningful discussions with internal stakeholders.
- Change management: "Suplari really made my beginning journey at Nordstrom that much easier," Dygas notes, highlighting how the platform accelerated her ability to understand the organization and develop effective strategies.
- Comprehensive supplier intelligence: The platform provided visibility into "who the suppliers are, what we're spending with them, and who within the company is engaging with them," enabling strategic improvements across supplier relationships.
- Collaborative decision-making: Suplari enabled fact-based insights that build trust and foster collaboration, with discussions often revealing unexpected insights about how decisions and supplier relationships affect overall spend.
Key trends in spend analysis case studies
These three implementations reveal several critical capabilities that distinguish automated spend analysis platforms from traditional approaches:
- Automated data integration and normalization
Enterprise organizations typically manage procurement data across multiple ERPs, procurement platforms, and subsidiary operations. Advanced platforms automatically integrate and normalize this diverse data, eliminating the manual effort that previously consumed most analytical resources.
- Real-time actionable insights
Traditional spend analysis provides historical reports. Advanced platforms deliver real-time insights that enable immediate action. BT's "two clicks" experience exemplifies how modern platforms eliminate the lag between data analysis and strategic decision-making.
- Cross-functional accessibility
Successful implementations extend value beyond procurement teams. BT's thousands of users across finance, sales, and accounting departments demonstrate how advanced platforms serve enterprise-wide analytical needs.
- Industry-specific intelligence
MediaNews Group's media industry requirements and Nordstrom's retail complexity show how advanced platforms provide industry-specific categorization and analytical frameworks that generic tools cannot match.
- Predictive and prescriptive capabilities
Rather than just reporting what happened, advanced platforms predict future opportunities and prescribe specific actions. This proactive approach enables procurement teams to focus on strategy rather than data mining.
Bottom line on spend analysis case studies
These three case studies demonstrate how modern spend analytics represents a fundamental shift in procurement capability rather than incremental improvement or backward looking reporting.
When you’re evaluating spend analysis platforms, these cases provide evidence that the right technology can transform both operational efficiency and strategic capability. The key is selecting platforms that provide industry-specific intelligence, enterprise-grade scalability, and the user experience necessary for organization-wide adoption.To see more industry-specific case studies and evaluate your options, book a demo with Suplari today.
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 modernize procurement operating models with reliable, AI-ready data.
