5 signs your business needs procurement software with BI reporting tools

Visibility is the foundation of effective spend management. After all, you can't manage what you can't see.

Finance and procurement teams are constantly challenged to optimize and reduce spending, improve vendor relationships, and enhance efficiency. However, traditional procurement processes often lack the necessary insights and visibility into critical data, making it challenging to identify areas for improvement and capitalize on opportunities.

This is where business intelligence (BI) reporting tools can be a game-changer.

You need procurement software with BI capabilities if your company:

• has inefficient manual procurement processes
• has poor vendor management
• is overspending
• has inadequate spend visibility and lack of real-time insights
• is manually analyzing data and creating reports

What do business intelligence tools do?

Artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced BI reporting tools analyze and interpret datasets, enabling organizations to gain actionable insights in real-time. The significance lies in their ability to uncover patterns and trends, improve predictability, and enable swift, data-driven decision-making that empowers business leaders to optimize performance and agility.

A powerful business intelligence tool integration offers a comprehensive solution to the procurement challenges faced by businesses today.

In this blog post, we'll explore the five telltale signs that your business could benefit from procurement software with AI-enhanced BI reporting tools. Whether you're lacking procurement visibility, grappling with data overload from multiple sources, or seeking a competitive edge, recognizing these signs will guide you toward finding the right solution to drive success.

Procurement software… with BI reporting tools?

Procurement software with embedded BI reporting power provides access to real-time analytics and intuitive dashboards that translate raw data into meaningful insights. Unlike traditional solutions, systems with integrated BI reporting tools provide a unified platform for managing, overseeing, and analyzing procurement processes and transactional spending data to offer a more comprehensive view of your organization's performance.

Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process that involves gathering, analyzing, and presenting data to help organizations make informed decisions.

With BI, businesses can gain valuable insights from their data, enabling them to identify trends and opportunities and ultimately, make well-informed decisions that lead to improved outcomes. BI tools allow finance and procurement managers to analyze spending data at a granular level to rationalize expenditure. This helps in identifying redundant expenses, unnecessary overheads, or inefficient processes that can be optimized or eliminated to reduce costs.

Procurement software with embedded BI reporting tools take procurement solutions to the next level. 

Leveraging AI, the systems transform raw data from procurement activities into interactive visualizations and actionable insights, and meaningful reporting power.

What business intelligence capabilities should my procurement solution include?

BI reporting tools in procurement software include real-time data analytics, dashboards, data visualizations, drill-down capabilities, and cross-functional reporting. These tools can empower finance and procurement teams to track spending patterns by variables such as employees, vendors, budgets or cost allocations, identify cost-saving opportunities, and benchmark process performance via community insights.

With better visibility into procurement, you can optimize spending strategies, leverage your data to negotiate more effectively with vendors, identify areas for cost reduction, and enhance compliance with procurement policies. With on-demand access to real-time data, business intelligence software can empower informed and responsible spending decisions that help companies maintain budgets, optimize spending and contain costs.  

The tangible benefits of BI reporting tools in procurement

Here's how procurement software with embedded BI reporting tools can improve procurement processes:

• Enhanced data visualization: BI reporting tools present procurement data in visually compelling ways, making it easier for finance and procurement professionals to analyze trends, identify opportunities, and address challenges promptly.
• Real-time reporting: With BI integration, procurement teams gain access to real-time data and reports, enabling them to monitor purchasing activities, track spending against multiple budgets, and respond swiftly to business needs.
• Comprehensive spend analysis: BI tools provide in-depth spend analysis, allowing businesses to identify cost-saving opportunities, negotiate better contracts with vendors, and measure the efficiency of their purchasing cycles .
• Predictive analytics: Leveraging AI-driven predictive analytics can improve forecasting, enhance risk management, optimize spend predictability, budgeting, planning, and resource allocation.

Procurement software with embedded BI reporting tools help to streamline the entire procurement process, foster greater efficiency, and provide strategic insights that drive cost savings. 

5 signs it's time to implement BI (business intelligence) reporting tools in your business

1. You have inefficient manual procurement processes

If you are struggling with manual process inefficiencies and delays, a lack of control, and maverick spending, your business could benefit from more spend visibility, reporting granularity, and spend control. Without digital workflows and clear visibility into purchasing activities, businesses may face challenges in identifying saving opportunities, maintaining control over spending and adhering to procurement policies.

2. You have poor vendor management

Signals include an extensive vendor list, uncontracted vendors, rogue spending, inconsistent product quality, and missed opportunities to save. A lack of visibility and control over the vendors your team purchases from can lead to increased operational costs, unfavorable payment terms, non-compliance with regulations, or contractual obligations that can lead to legal disputes and financial penalties.

3. You're overspending

If your team is exceeding budgets and overspend is only identified after the fact. BI tools could play a crucial role in preventing overspending by providing real-time insights into budgets at decision points and on-demand reporting that allows businesses to monitor spending and budget deviations promptly. With the ability to analyze spending patterns with greater granularity, BI reporting tools empower informed decision-making, leading to cost-saving opportunities and optimized spend management.

4. You have inadequate spend visibility and a lack of real-time insights

A lack of visibility into what your team purchases, which vendors they’re purchasing from, how much, and how frequently they’re spending will put your company at risk of overspending, uncontrolled costs, fraud, and audit issues. To manage spend and adequately track operational costs, you need visibility into procurement processes and spending behavior to make informed decisions.  Blindly cutting costs without accurate data can negatively impact operations. The absence of digital oversight can lead to suboptimal allocation of resources, resulting in inefficiencies and increased costs.

Without BI reporting tools, companies may face delays in accessing critical information, hindering timely decision-making and responsiveness. Companies may rely on intuition rather than data-driven insights, leading to less informed and riskier decision-making that often requires corrective action.

5. Your data analysis, data entry, and reporting processes are manual

Manual data entry consumes valuable time and resources and increases the risk of errors. If you’re tracking data from multiple sources across numerous spreadsheets, the margin for error and inaccuracies significantly increases. The lack of automation in reporting further compounds the issue, as it hampers real-time access to critical information and delays the availability of insights necessary for timely action, affecting your company’s competitiveness.

Introducing Fraxion: procurement software with embedded BI reporting tools

Realize the potential of AI-driven BI reporting tools through Insights, an embedded analytics platform seamlessly integrated into Fraxion’s procurement software suite. The addition of BI reporting tools to Fraxion's procurement functionalities empowers customers to take proactive measures in reducing operational spending, eliminating wastage, and optimizing process efficiency, compliance, and identifying cost-saving opportunities.

Fraxion’s embedded Microsoft Power BI business intelligence and reporting tools, enable finance and procurement managers to track and analyze:

• The goods and services your business is buying
• Which vendors you're buying from 
• Purchasing frequency
• Spend by financial period 
• How spend data compares to previous years
• The value of spend by employee, vendor, cost center, project, budget, transaction or company
• Supplier diversity initiatives
• Community insights that enable you to benchmark your processes and against the performance of peer companies
• Alerts and what triggered policy red flags
• and more

We can help you leverage business intelligence (BI)

Fraxion's procurement software with embedded BI reporting tools provides the insights and analytics you need to make informed data-driven decisions to optimize your procurement processes and spending. Get in touch to discuss your business requirements today. Discover the power of BI and take your procurement process to the next level.