Stephen Phillips
March 2021
In 2017 The Economist stated: "The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data." Meaningful data and information are the fundamental building blocks of the modern organization. Finding patterns in data and information creates corporate knowledge and knowhow, understanding and applying that knowledge is wisdom. Combining that wisdom with an awareness of the underlying essence of a truth provides insight. Insight drives effective business decisions and relationships.
A lot of data and information is internally generated: financial data, customer information, product and inventory data. But of course, if a business is to thrive in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous (VUCA) operating environment, external sources of data and information are vital providing broader context as well as augmenting and informing internal sources.
Data and information procurement is a complex category, ranging from one off purchases for specific users to annual or multi-year enterprise licenses for sophisticated suites of services.
These products must be matched to the needs and use cases of the business, so data and information buying is often delegated across the organization. This decentralization or delegation leads individual business units and teams to pursue their own acquisition strategies, which in turn often leads to inconsistency, duplication, inefficiency and a plethora of micro relationships with marginal suppliers.
Applying a consistent policy and process in order to the bring this category under control can feel daunting, given its criticality, the broad range of stakeholders and the high level of sensitivity associated with these services. Indeed, many of our clients felt this way, hesitating to tackle a comparatively low value, but high risk category.
Working with our experienced professionals to incorporate Couranto into their existing SAP implementations, our clients are able to bring category spend under control. The Couranto punch out catalog includes over 100,000 information products from an extensive portfolio of vendors. These include market data desktops, data feeds, databases, websites, books, journals, newspapers, research reports, expert networks, memberships, licensing agencies and SaaS applications. Anything not yet in the catalog can be added in a matter of hours, enabling stakeholders to quickly order the services they need to facilitate their decision making or client conversations.
Couranto has successfully delivered a number of source to pay (S2P) initiatives, fully integrating the procurement process from product identification through invoicing to delivery or activation. So Couranto will help you fulfil your strategic sourcing objectives:
- Eliminating tail spend by taking custody of an extensive number of suppliers;
- Consolidating contracts to reduce duplication;
- Maximizing your economies of scale, both nationally and internationally;
- Reducing supply chain risk by only engaging approved suppliers;
- Driving transparency with a comprehensive inventory of users and products;
- Integrating this critical category into the wider sourcing portfolio;
- Enforcing a rigorous fiscal approval workflow;
- Improving reporting to enhance accountability;
- Automating user polls and surveys for better renewal decisions;
- Managing and preventing automatic license renewals;
- Enabling you to meet your supplier diversity targets: Couranto is a certified woman owned business.
Do you want to use the power of SAP Ariba to manage your third party data and information spend?
