How Spend Management Brings in the Money

A new category of software for spend management is recommended as an integration platform that links isolated business processes.

The interest in the new software is quite obviously great, and it has – according to Google trends – steadily increased over the course of the past few years.

Anyone who googles “spend management” today does so because the term promises innovation, heralds technical progress. Spend management software solutions, it is hoped, will not only neatly document past business transactions, they will also positively influence future occurrences.

They should – for example, thanks to the means of artificial intelligence (AI) – reduce the effort required to manage variable costs. Consulting firm McKinsey estimates that most companies could save three to four percent on their expenses through improvements in spend management.

Spend management solutions are a new category of software. But the problem these programs are trying to solve is an old one: these problems were among the very first to be addressed by programmers in the early years of commercial computing – the late 1950s.

American historian of technology Rosalind Williams[1] uses the example of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to describe how the introduction of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can shake an organization to its foundations without, however, bringing about any significant savings.

Here, a “Reengineering Project” was launched in the early 1990s with the intention of making the management of research and teaching more efficient with the help of software from SAP.

This IT project is worth remembering, not only because it failed, but also because the failure here, at this world-famous university, cannot be blamed on the technophobia of the users involved. The problems with the introduction of SAP R/3 at MIT show that the performance of a business management software can also be measured by how well it can fit into an existing environment.

Perk has developed a spend management solution that can be adapted to company-specific workflows with modest effort.

As a cloud-based integration platform, the software is able to mediate between internal and external data collections and link isolated business processes.

It is also prepared for the exchange of information with standard business software: Common interfaces (REST API and others) and the products of many vendors such as MS Dynamics, Netsuite, SAP or Sage are supported. Privacy protection and data security are always guaranteed.

Read all about the question “what is spend management” in our article below.