SpendHQ
The Go-to Spend Data Analytics Solution for Procurement Excellence

Over the years, spend management has become more complex especially as enterprises are embracing new technology to enable and support strategic sourcing and procurement. However, traditional spend solutions entail process delays, and fall short in terms of enterprise spend data transformation, visibility, transparency, and reporting capabilities. Their lack of standardization and robust insights compels progressive businesses to evaluate alternate spend analytics tools for streamlining and optimizing procurement.

Enter SpendHQ!

The Atlanta-based organization is an end-to-end provider of a procurement-focused spend analytics software with an award-winning SaaS application that delivers accurate and actionable insights into enterprise spend data. Since its inception 12 years ago, SpendHQ has emerged as a sought-after solution in the market for sourcing and procurement professionals to drive bottom-line cost savings.

CIO Applications recently interviewed Scott Macfee, CEO, and Jason Bray, CTO of SpendHQ. We shed some light on how the company positions itself as a full-service, fast-paced solution provider in enabling clients to realize their full potential in the procurement-based spend analytics space. They also talk about their client engagement model and value proposition.

"What's unique about us is that we are built by procurement experts for procurement experts," begins Scott.

Could you give us a brief overview of SpendHQ?

Scott: SpendHQ is a procurement spend analysis solution that provides rapid, accurate, and detailed visibility into enterprise spend data. Our full-service SaaS spend analytics solution delivers actionable insight for sourcing and procurement professionals. Our tools and technologies are designed from the ground up by top sourcing experts and our US-based procurement specialists. Over 300 organizations ranging from the fortune 500 to mid-market organizations utilize our solution to drive bottom line savings. SpendHQ has been recognized annually as an industry leader by Spend Matters’ SolutionMap, and Ardent Partners’ Key Solution Pro.

What are some of the challenges that your clients face today? And how do you address them with your portfolio of offerings?

Jason: Our clients often find their data cluttered and rely on a solution like SpendHQ to gather, collect, transform, and analyze it all so they can make the best procurement decisions. Most of our clients' CPOs and CIOs lack the niche expertise and essential bandwidth in their IT departments to solve internal data categorization and normalization challenges. Moreover, they are unaware of the procurement knowledge required to analyze large complex data sets and build a robust supplier database.

To this end, the value we bring is a fast, repeatable, and scalable data transformation and analytics process. Be it cleaning, normalization, categorization, enrichment, and ranking of data - our solution leverages custom-built databases and advanced algorithms to effectively organize the procurement data.

We then offer an easy-to-use, SaaS-based spend analysis software with modules such as spend visibility, contract visibility, category management, supplier diversity enrichment, and document management. This enables procurement teams to access data and insights on their spend profiles, vendor contracts, diverse suppliers, and major sourcing categories. Users can instantly uncover savings opportunities via an interactive series of SaaS based dashboards to view their consolidated spend data. Our sourcing application driven by AI and ML is designed in a way that users are presented with usable data from a tool built by and maintained by skilled procurement data specialists. This provides customized savings roadmaps and spend compliance analyses to eliminate anomalies so that our clients have actionable insights and can drive procurement best practices.

Could you elaborate on your client onboarding process?

Jason: We currently serve over 300 global customers ranging from Fortune 500s to mid-market companies. For the most part, new clients with distributed enterprise systems lack clear visibility into their organization’s spend. They might have significant fragmentation across their supplier base in a particular category. We really dive in and tackle their concerns around their current spend and how they can identify main opportunities for savings.

This is where we really step in educating our clients to identify where they are at on their procurement spend analytics maturity scale. Our procurement experts on the SpendHQ Professional Services implementation team address a category management strategy to prioritize their saving needs. We help them not only to develop a strategy but also recognize savings leakage to ensure compliance.

What differentiates SpendHQ from other players in the market?

Scott: Taking pride in our rich heritage of procurement expertise and culture, we have built an incredible team and pride ourselves on our innovative and collaborative environment. There are a multitude of factors that makes us the leading SaaS based spend analytics tool in the market. We really differentiate ourselves based on the depth of expertise we have which is embedded in our software. We have the benefit of being built by procurement professionals with a solid history of executing over 6,000 global sourcing and procurement projects. In addition, our procurement and sourcing experts unite with clients to develop a best-in-class spend taxonomy customized to their unique business needs. We offer a faster and simpler way to achieve true spend visibility with 97% classification enterprise spend data. On top of that, we promote putting the power in the client's hands via our user-friendly application, as they possess the know-how of their businesses. We enable the self-servicing and processing of enterprise spend data in a quick and efficient manner.

Can you tell us about a customer success story that you've had in the recent past?

Jason: We have addressed plenty of industry challenges and have been able to utilize that wealth of experience to set benchmarks. For instance, a large hardware manufacturing company approached us to help them across their growth initiatives. Lacking category management strategies, they had a hard time in driving savings even with a larger procurement organization. There were a lot of paper based and manual processes involved. The client did not have the right strategy or process in place to create a highly efficient procurement function. To this end, the SpendHQ team stepped in to automate their processes and create a frictionless data process. We helped them strategize and redeploy their resources accordingly. Ultimately, our software delivered a savings roadmap by giving visibility into their raw spend data in just seven days, a process that previously took quarters to realize. It was really exciting to watch our client’s procurement organization succeed at their goals.

Scott: Similarly, we worked with one of the largest global consumer product companies who had only 40% of visibility into their $140 billion spend. We executed our data transformation process, ultimately classifying 97% of their spend. As a result, the client can now visualize their data and have developed a savings roadmap that will deliver double-digit percentage savings.

What does the future look like for SpendHQ?

Scott: Earlier this summer, we officially spun out as a separate entity from Insight Sourcing Group, our former parent company, and received a $10 million investment into our business. At the core of our business is driving actionable insights for our customers that result in meaningful savings. This investment in our business will drive the acceleration of our AI/ML powered insights capabilities, third party data enrichment and ERP integrations. It will also bring game changing capabilities that don’t exist in the market currently that leverage our deep procurement heritage and expertise. Along with advancing our roadmap, we’ll be further investing in our go-to- market team to ensure more clients have the opportunity to leverage our market leading platform.