How to make Procurement insights pop up in Power BI

Procurement analytics has been always a hot topic that successful procurement leaders are actively using to draw the map of their procurement goals. But, how can we use some techniques to make the process of finding insights quite seamless for the analytics consumers. In these article series, I'll try to highlight some of these techniques that I believe would achieve this goal.

Grouping and segmenting:

One of the biggest issues that faces any data analytics solution is the vast granularity exists in the data. An example might help explaining this; let's say that 3,000 suppliers make up the total suppliers base within your organisation, looking at the total spend by individual suppliers would provide good insight to understand the spending profile across all your suppliers; however, if we grouped these suppliers in top 5 suppliers, top 10, top 50 & top100 would provide a completely different view of your spend such as:

• What percent of spend each of the top N suppliers buckets contributes to the overall organisation spend.
• Who are my top strategic suppliers that makes up most of my spend profile.
• Where the procurement efforts should be focused when trying to strategically categorising our total spend.

Another area where the grouping technique would be very effective is in analysing payment terms compliance;

As you can see, by segmenting the duration to payment in days into four different buckets lets you at a glance see that the payments duration is all over the place and there would be an opportunity to put some controls that would directly affect your cash flow.