Art of Procurement Podcast – Procurement’s Data Dream Team

“Once you have clean data, it becomes a business asset. You can now answer questions from it. When it’s sitting there in a data swamp – it’s not even a data lake – you cannot leverage any type of insights from it.” – Robert Birch, Director, Data & Analytics, SpendHQ

“‘Data! Data! Data!’ he cried impatiently. ‘I can’t make bricks without clay!’”

Little did Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle know just how relevant this famous lament would become in our tech-dependent, data-rich world. It strikes at the heart of one of procurement’s biggest challenges – there is not enough quality data. 

If clean, reliable, accessible data is the “clay” procurement needs to create value for the business and make informed decisions, then there’s no doubt they need more of it. 

Philip Ideson recently spoke with Andy Moir, Director of Product Marketing, Mitchell Couper, Vice President of Delivery and Business Intelligence, Robert Birch, Director, Data and Analytics, all from SpendHQ, about the kinds of resources and approaches procurement needs to overcome their biggest data challenges and create an environment conducive to value creation and differentiated decision making. They also discuss the critical skill sets procurement needs to work through some of the more complicated roadblocks on the path to better data hygiene – to turn individual raw materials into usable clay.

Text taken from Art of Procurement.