Data presents a recurring challenge for Procurement. The function either has too much, in the case of spend data, or not enough, in the case of performance and impact. This challenge has limited teams around the world, resigning many of them to tactical and administrative roles.
Floor and Decor, a quickly growing flooring retail brand, recognized these challenges and their implications on continued growth and financial performance. The brand’s Indirect Procurement team turned to SpendHQ to establish a data foundation the entire organization could trust.
In the clips below, taken from our recent webinar with Procurement Leaders, Head of Indirect Procurement G’Sean Williams explains the challenges his team faced and how they leveraged SpendHQ to overcome them.
Looking for the solution to Procurement’s disparate data challenges
As a fast-growing company, Floor and Décor needed a way to handle and understand indirect spend and activity. G’Sean understood that without it, Procurement’s impact, especially on the P&L, could be placed at risk. His first step was to establish a way to truly understand what, where, and how much the organization was spending. He calls this a “key win” in their transformation.
After seeing how an accessible data foundation positively impacted relationships with stakeholders, the team realized it could go further by optimizing the way it approached procurement project tracking and measurements. Instead of relying on spreadsheets and manual processes for more than 75 annual initiatives, they turned to SpendHQ’s Procurement Performance Management (PPM). “This is newer to us…. now we have a dashboard that keeps these projects all in one place, which is beautiful.”
Turning data into impact
Understanding why a data foundation is important isn’t the same as using it to deliver results. Once they had a clean, visible foundation of data, Floor and Decor’s Indirect Procurement team set five goals for using Spend Intelligence to drive impact:
- Establish a spend baseline to get on the same page with Finance
- Align with stakeholders to drive collaborative projects and maximize impact
- Define categories to set strategies and streamline opportunities
- Share supplier management with stakeholders to hit diversity targets
- Predict growth to better plan and collaborate with Finance
The last goal was particularly important to the team. Using their new data foundation from Spend Intelligence, the team went beyond current-state spend analytics to plan and forecast their late-year impact with a high degree of certainty. This ability redefined the importance of Indirect Procurement and established it as an indispensable ally to Finance and several other stakeholder groups.
Procurement’s “whole new level”
Procurement knows its suppliers and contracts the best. Indirect Procurement’s new data foundation allowed the team to access and understand spend data in a way that made it possible to find more opportunities with less effort and tie them back to specific P&L impact. Using this ability, the team tapped into overall and long-term spend trends, even month over month, that allowed them to isolate and impact factors that were impossible to see and understand beforehand.
Keeping Finance’s attention
Being able to leverage spend, produce results, report on them, and forecast future impact was a game-changer for Indirect Procurement. But the team understood that the function needed a way to simplify its impact to stay relevant, especially in a world where supply chain and direct spend emergencies (i.e. Suez Canal, COVID) seem to be becoming the rule, and not the expectation.
To accomplish this, they needed a way to make project tracking and impact reporting intuitive and accessible. He knew that leveraging manual processes like spreadsheets would only make these problems worse, so he turned to digital procurement for the answers. However, he found that as they evaluated other options, only SpendHQ’s PPM had the workflows his team needed to centrally manage projects and make their impact easy to see. “In the 24 years I’ve been doing this, [SpendHQ PPM] is this first time I’ve seen this.”
How you can take action today
The clips included here are just a small selection of the value G’Sean Williams discussed receiving from SpendHQ’s solutions. To hear the rest, watch the entire webinar here for a full exploration of the team’s P&L impact and how they got there.
Or are you ready to discover just how valuable Spend Intelligence and Procurement Performance Management could be for your organization? Schedule a custom demo with us today to see the tools Floor and Décor used to produce the results highlighted in these clips.
Ready to discover just how valuable Spend Intelligence and Procurement Performance Management could be for your organization?
Schedule a custom demo with us today to see the tools Floor and Décor used to produce the results highlighted in these clips.
Schedule a Demo