Why Consolidating Spend Management Tech Enables Business Resiliency

You don’t have to be the CIO to understand that business success depends on your enterprise’s ability to leverage the power of digital technology. In fact, according to IDC, the COVID-19 pandemic has so far underscored the importance of digital transformation when it comes to staying agile, accelerating areas across the business such as:

• Operations: A digitally transformed operation is based on resiliency in all parts of its organization and in its decision-making. The COVID-19 pandemic emphasized why it is critical for digital organizations to build a house of resiliency with innovation and operational agility as its foundation.
• Digital Infrastructure: Responding quickly to business deceleration/acceleration brought on by the pandemic required greater use of infrastructure resources that minimized underutilization of assets and improved the ability to scale up capacity for critical new experience or analytic workloads.
• Connectedness: Organizations and individuals need to connect seamlessly, regardless of their location, situation, or context. During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have seen how critical it is for information to be created, shared, or consumed in real-time.

And to build business resiliency, your primary focus – even as remediation actions are taken to reduce costs or take advantage of pandemic-related revenue opportunities – is to remain digitally fit. This includes having a holistic grasp on spend, which is imperative for cost-control and maximizing the value of resulting data.

But when it comes to digital, less is sometimes more. With too many platforms and tools, you can run into complications such as:

• Data becoming siloed
• Reporting is onerous and “real-time data” is just an ideal, not a reality
• Departments may start moving in different directions using non-standardized tools, leaving you without a single source of data truth

These issues will hamper your business agility in the face of recovering from recessions, rapidly expanding into new markets, or when exploring mergers and acquisitions (M&A). The more siloed your spend data and tools are, the harder it is to understand what, where, and why your employees are spending, which can leave you exposed to inefficiencies, a lack of compliance, and even fraud. All of these are areas that can quickly drain budgets and impact the bottom line, while also taking a considerable amount of time to reconcile. Now that doesn’t sound resilient.

Evaluate your current mix of spend management platforms and vendors by asking these five questions to determine if consolidation makes sense for your enterprise.