London—July 10, 2014—Is poor data stopping chief procurement officers (CPOs) from helping their organizations deliver savings and mange supplier risks? According to research conducted by Rosslyn Analytics, a provider of self-service analytics in the cloud, procurement leaders continue to struggle with getting the right data in the right hands at the right time.
The survey of 67 CPOs based in the United Kingdom reveals that business leaders spend six working days per month collecting and preparing data for analysis and reporting. Other findings reveal that:
- 36 percent spend most of their time improving the quality of data needed for accurate analysis and reporting (followed by collecting data from multiple sources and creating/editing dashboards or reports, 22 and 13 percent, respectively).
- 57 percent say that two to five people are needed to prepare data and/or create the dashboards and reports.
- 36 percent spend more than a day a month collecting data from sources, with 29 percent needing to allocate a half to a full day of staff resources for data collection.
- Over a third (35 percent) spend more than 10 hours on analyzing spend every month (31 percent spend five to nine hours and 26 percent spend one to four hours).
“It’s clear that organizations spend too much time on preparing data than actually analyzing the insight they were hired to act on. This means that opportunities are being missed from being able to spend the time on the value-add that focusing on analytics can bring,” said Hugh Cox, chief data officer, Rosslyn Analytics.
Once the data is collected, 28 percent of procurement teams spend more than a day classifying/categorizing data whilst 19 and 25 percent, respectively, need to spend between 10 to 24 hours and five to nine hours on data quality.
When asked about how much time is spent on enriching data, 42 percent of respondents dedicate more than 10 hours every month to adding contextual information. In a startling finding, 76 percent of procurement teams spend more than five hours every month on creating and editing dashboards and reports—time that could be spent on analyzing and sharing insight with colleagues.
