Enabling Executive Spend Management Decisions Amidst the Pandemic and Beyond: Smith & Nephew’s Success Story

“The fact that we have greater control over spend and visibility…has allowed us to really position ourselves as business partners-not only creating information but also actually enabling decision-making to our senior executives,” shared Jorge Monge, travel and expense lead for Smith & Nephew, a global medical devices company.

Before the pandemic hit, Smith & Nephew was an early adopter of innovative spend management tools for its travel and expense programs. Making spend management easy to understand and analyze was a leadership priority that Jorge Monge was charged with overseeing. While managing spend across more than 44 countries, the company built a spend management infrastructure that allows it to thrive amidst the global health crisis.

“2020 has been quite a year, as we all know…We have been able to use analytics…not only to track but also to forecast a way that expenditure is going to look in the coming years. We also produce COVID-specific analytics to our executive community, so that they know how travel and expenses are behaving and how it is actually evolving across the pandemic,” shares Monge.

In addition to weathering the pandemic storm, the thoughtful and streamlined way that Smith & Nephew is now managing global spend is empowering executives to shift their spend management program from tactical and compliance-oriented, to one that’s strategy-focused. Monge shares that this spend visibility is “producing a real set of analytics that not only allows us to really make business decisions, but also as a global process owner, consider how our spend is behaving and then take that into account to make further business decisions in terms of the road map that we intend to follow strategically for travel and expenses for Smith & Nephew.”

Watch how Smith & Nephew streamlined executive spend management decisions here. (Part 3)

Watch how Smith & Nephew struck a balance between employee experience and compliance here. (Part 1)

Watch how Smith & Nephew increased spend accuracy here. (Part 2)

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