Few enterprises know what they spend, on which products, or with which suppliers...

In the absence of good spend data, supply managers and business executives are forced to develop strategies and decisions based on intuition rather than actual data.

Impediments to accurate spend data include:

• incompatible data sources
• incomplete and/or inaccurate spend data
• insufficient category expertise
• inconsistent naming conventions
• limited analysis tools

In the absence of all of these, it will be difficult for any organization to understand how it spends its money or how to improve procurement practices.