SpendHQ: Vendor Analysis (Part 2) — Product Strengths & Weaknesses

It is the rare scenario that those using a purpose-built technology are the best ones to build it. But in the case of Insight Sourcing Group’s (ISG) SpendHQ solution for spend analytics, the influence of those who initially built it from the ground up to suit their own purposes is undeniable. SpendHQ needed a means of helping clients unearth, implement, track and manage different types of procurement savings opportunities in the most efficient manner possible. And they were not happy with fitting off-the-shelf spend visibility solutions to their own processes. Unsurprisingly, the final product, built by analytically-oriented sourcing professionals for analytically-oriented sourcing professionals, would end up beating to its own sourcing and cost reduction drum — and is quite unlike any other spend analysis solution in the market today.

In addition to offering a managed service for data cleansing, classification and enrichment, SpendHQ provides a core spend visibility engine, which provides an overall snapshot and drillable view into past expenditure and savings opportunities. The application also provides a module that offers enriched vendor detail information (with Hoover’s-level type information on suppliers) and a contract module, which stores all contracts, metadata, and allows for the creation of alerts and notifications around the metadata. Finally, SpendHQ also provides a compliance module, where the user can see for the selected categories, the addressable spend, the managed spend, the compliance rate and the impact rate (percentage of compliant spend against addressable spend) as categories with low impact rates have high opportunity category (savings) management, which, on a category basis, summarizes spend, managed, core list compliance and pricing accuracy.

This Spend Matters PRO vendor snapshot explores SpendHQ’s strengths and weaknesses in the spend analysis area, providing facts and expert analysis to help procurement organizations decide if they should shortlist the vendor as a potential provider. Part 1 of our analysis comprised a company and detailed solution overview and a SWOT analysis, as well as a summary recommended fit suggestion for what types of organizations should consider SpendHQ. The remaining parts of this multipart series will offer a user selection guide, user interface (UI/UX) analysis, competitive alternatives and evaluation and selection considerations.