Give a gift to your customers

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking a reseller’s role is simply to fulfil customer requirements. This is, of course, part of the raison d’etre for resellers -- but if they are to be seen as adding value they need to go beyond fulfilment and help their customers innovate.

This does not necessarily mean advising customers to spend a lot on new hardware and software, especially when many are still struggling to balance the books as the economy crawls out of recession. Turn the situation on its head: how about introducing customers to a service that provides a clear, concise view of how their business spends, thus helping reduce that spend?

The British organisation with the biggest post-recession deficit is UK plc itself. The coalition government, to sell its austerity package, aimed to make sure what it saw as it predecessor’s profligacy clear for all to see – aiming to publish data on spending as quickly as possible.

It used a spend visibility service from UK Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor Rosslyn Analytics that extracted, processed and enhanced data from the government’s COINS database. Thirty million rows of spend data were processed in around 18 hours. The data is now available for public scrutiny.

Most businesses do not want to publicise their own spending, yet the same level of insight can be invaluable internally. Better decision-making and spend optimisation can be achieved when there are answers available to questions such as:

• How many contracts do we have with a given supplier? Can we get a better price by consolidating them?
• Do we have multiple suppliers for the same components in different parts of the business?
• What is the risk profile of a given supplier? Does it make sense to pay more for stability of supply?
• Is the supplier meeting the latest standards required by the business?

IT departments are the -- sometimes unwitting -- guardians of spend data. But because it is often spread across a bewildering array of ERP, accounting and contract databases it is hard to get an aggregated view. Rosslyn’s service has pre-built interfaces for most common applications for spending data, and offers access to external sources that enable enrichment of the spend data with information about suppliers and so on.

Spend analytics for the future

Rosslyn claims to have the first fully automated on-demand spend analytics service. Other vendors such as Zycus and Emptoris offer spend analytics but as on-premise implementations. Some try to achieve the same end with business intelligence tools, but these do not have the capability to integrate and enrich spend data and are more suited to reporting on the consolidated data after it has been run through a spend analytics service.

Resellers wondering how they can continue to deliver value to their customers when there is seemingly little spare budget need to look to such innovations. Demonstrating that a certain initiative can pay for itself in a short space of time is a sure way to get the business listening.

Saving five per cent on a spend budget of £1m is more than enough to set up and pay for an initial subscription to a spend analytics service and a chance for resellers to help their customers’ IT staff add value to the businesses they both serve, via the data in their charge. See our report at http://www.quocirca.com/reports/501/a-gift-from-it-to-the-business .

Bob Tarzey is service director at Quocirca