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Compare the best spend analytics software of 2026 — Coupa, SAP Ariba, Ivalua, Suplari and JAGGAER — across pricing, use cases and features, with direct links.
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Compare the best spend analytics software of 2026 — Coupa, SAP Ariba, Ivalua, Suplari and JAGGAER — across pricing, use cases and features, with direct links.
Spend Analytics for Procurement Management & Consulting Services
The top executive looked at the quarterly report with a confused look on their face. The figures didn’t make sense. Even though they were trying hard to minimize costs and were in talks with several suppliers, spending had nonetheless gone up by 8% over the previous year. Departments were buying things from dozens of suppliers, some of whom they had never heard of before. The IT staff paid subscriptions to software. Marketing worked with a number of different agencies. Operations has contacts with vendors that procurement didn’t know about. Money was going out in all directions, but no one could say where it was going or why.
Does this sound familiar? Every day in boardrooms across all businesses, this scenario happens. Companies spend millions of dollars every year, but they don’t have the basic tools to figure out how they’re spending their money. It’s like driving a car with a cloudy windshield; you know you’re moving.
Spend analytics goes from being a “nice-to-have” reporting tool to a powerful tool for getting the best deals when you buy things.
What is Spend Analytics and How Does It Work?
Spend analytics is the organized way of gathering, cleaning, sorting, and studying spending data in order to lower expenses, boost productivity, and keep an eye on compliance. Think of it as providing your procurement staff X-ray vision into every dollar that comes into your business. This lets them see trends, inefficiencies, and chances that would be hard to find in data systems that aren’t connected.
Spend analytics goes beyond typical reporting, which only shows you how much you spent. It answers important strategic questions like “Who are we buying from?” What are we buying? Which departments are spending the most money? Are we receiving good prices? Are staff following the rules for buying things?
Modern spend analytics platforms gather data from many sources, such as ERP systems, purchase orders, invoices, credit card transactions, and supplier contracts. They then use cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically sort and analyse this data. It used to take procurement teams weeks or months to put together by hand, but today they can do it in hours or even minutes.
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The Business Case: Why Spend Analytics Delivers Exceptional ROI
Companies that use advanced spend analytics get great returns. Hobson & Company discovered that organizations that used full spend analytics systems saved 80% of the time they spent gathering and analysing different expenditure data. They also saw a 10% rise in addressable spend and a 5% decrease in price, even when market costs were going up.
Independent study shows that procurement firms that use spend analytics get up to 63 times their money back, thanks to both immediate savings and improvements in how they work. According to McKinsey study, using data effectively in procurement can boost value-creation efforts by as much as 200%.
The effect on finances is considerable. Companies lose out on savings possibilities because they can’t see them clearly, which costs them between $15 and $55 million for every $500 million they spend. Gartner says that fragmented expenditure data can lead to procurement inefficiencies that cost businesses 3% to 11% of their targeted spend each year, a loss that gets worse every year.
For example, think about this: A multinational industrial automation company that spends about €2 billion a year had trouble managing data across more than 10 old ERP systems that didn’t have any uniform processes or ways to keep an eye on suppliers. The organization was able to see all of their spending, make accurate 12-month forecasts, and find potential savings of more than 5% using AI-driven dashboards after putting in place a full spend analytics solution.
A Practical Roadmap for Using Spend Analytics
A planned approach to implementing spend analytics that focuses on getting fast wins while growing toward full capabilities is the key to success.
Set clear goals and objectives
Discover what information is needed, including how it will affect how you spend money: how to better improve what you do. Establish goals and track with the right key performance indicators. Determine which areas are the most important: areas with significant spending, various suppliers, expiring contracts, or items that are market dependent regarding price.
Find and combine data sources
Identify any of the company’s important data sources. This includes ERP systems, sourcing platforms, accounts payable, credit card purchases, or supplier contracts. Ensure that the data is pulled by including participants in different departments to gather the data. The analysis will be only as good as the quality of the data, and the better the data is assembled, the better the analysis will be.
Make Data Clean and Consistent
In order to derive actionable insights, accurate data is required. Evaluate the data closely to identify and resolve any inconsistencies. Make sure that the formats are consistent, the descriptors are unambiguous, and the information is identical across languages, currencies, and locations. This prepares the data for accurate analysis by minimizing the need for manual modifications later on.
Use AI and automation
Today’s spend analytics solutions use AI to automatically categorize your spend data, identify outliers, and provide you with prescriptive insights. AI-driven solutions can reduce the time to group and classify suppliers on average by over 90%. Conversely, machine learning models improve as they process more and more data. Organizations that use AI-powered spend analytics indicate that they are able to gain insights in minutes that would typically take a team of analysts weeks to aggregate.
Look at and come up with new ideas
One of the pieces of recommendations is that you should routinely review and monitor key financial metrics including cost per unit, budget deviations, supplier performance and cash flow. By doing so, you will be able to assess the effectiveness of spending, identify opportunities for improvement, and optimize the data processes so they produce better data
Keep an eye on performance and make chans
In the case of checking and reporting on financial data, review and report regularly on financial data! In order to assess areas where spending can be improved and assess how effectively spending is being address important KPIs such as cost per unit, budget deviation, supplier performance, and cash flow.
How UnivDatos Can Help Transform Your Procurement Function
UnivDatos brings deep expertise in procurement consulting and spend analytics to help organizations transform fragmented spending data into actionable intelligence that drives measurable results. Our comprehensive strategy begins with the collection of various forms of data ERP systems, purchase orders, invoices, contracts with suppliers, and then we will apply several methods of cleansing data rigorously ensuring accuracy and reliability. Using AI based classification, and machine learning algorithms, we can automate the categorization of all spending data using standard taxonomies or custom categorization aligned to your organization. Our consulting offering does not simply provide data, we offer analysis using the data that identifies potential supplier consolidation, category based savings potential, pricing anomalies, compliance deficiencies, and maverick spend patterns that eat away at profitability. We also create intuitive, interactive dashboards that enable stakeholders from category managers to senior executives self-serve analytics to make timely data-supported decisions. With Univdatos as your partner, you will achieve visibility, control, and valuable analysis to reduce procurement costs as a sustainable margin impact of 5-15%, improve efficiency, develop supplier relationships, and transform procurement from a cost centre to a value creating strategic business partner.
Related Blog:-
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Spend Analytics Market 2022 Global Industry Extensive Competitive Landscape on Size, Volume, Trends, Share and Revenue| Regional Forecast By 2028
Spend Analytics Market 2022 Global Industry Extensive Competitive Landscape on Size, Volume, Trends, Share and Revenue| Regional Forecast By 2028
This report studies the Spend Analytics Market with many aspects of the industry like the market size, market status, market trends and forecast, the report also provides brief information of the competitors and the specific growth opportunities with key market drivers. Find the complete Spend Analytics Market analysis segmented by companies, region, type and applications in the report. The…
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Current state assessment analyzes and synthesizes spend analytics, costs, pricing, contracts, practices, and metrics. Baseline for future state. call us now!
Procurement As a Strategic Function Most fledgling businesses grow into fully functional organizations by empowering each department to recognize its needs and be accountable for fulfilling them. Not…
Analyst Mapping Service Launches
Asset managers now able to track and benchmark analyst moves, seniority and coverage for relevant sectors
London 23 November 2020: Substantive Research, the research discovery and research spend analytics provider for the buy-side, has today launched its Analyst Mapping service, allowing asset managers to gain an aggregated view of banks’ analyst moves, their seniority and sector coverage of relevance to them. Managers can now understand which brokers are investing or disinvesting in experienced analysts covering the sectors and asset classes pertinent to their strategies and allocate their research budgets more efficiently, to ensure the quality of research is maintained.
The changes in the provision and consumption of research following MiFID II unbundling requirements coupled with the move to virtual engagements in response to COVID-19 has presented asset managers with a number of challenges. They have to ensure that their investment professionals receive the quality research they need, at an appropriate valuation. Furthermore, brokers are continuously making changes across their analyst teams as they concentrate on their comparative advantages and areas of greatest leverage.
By launching its Analyst Mapping service, Substantive Research gives buy-side firms access to centralised data to track analyst moves, providing them with crucial context for the evaluation and benchmarking of their payments to research providers. This helps managers optimise their research spend and better manage their broker relationships, whilst recognising where their providers are investing.
What’s more, firms can recognise new areas of quality and coverage inside and outside their existing broker list. This is particularly important post MIFID II, as they are no longer allowed to read research they haven’t paid for.
Mike Carrodus, CEO of Substantive Research, said: “The global research market shows no sign of convergence yet. Europe remains committed to unbundling, with asset managers paying for research from their own P&L, but considering a softening of the rules for research on SMEs and fixed income; at the same time, the US continues to pass research costs to their client base. However, it is clear that both sides are working with capped budgets, meaning they are allocating carefully and transparently.”
He added: “Our Analyst Mapping tool will enable asset managers to have an aggregate view over analyst moves across the market, evaluate where banks invest or disinvest, benchmark sector expertise gains and losses broker by broker, and ultimately decide how to allocate their research spend in relation to the areas and asset classes relevant to them.”
The Analyst Mapping service is delivered as a realtime Dashboard, breaking down relevant data by country, sector and individual brokers; multiple disparate data sources are cleaned, standardised and checked for gaps to ensure accuracy and enable a holistic view.
Key developments in analyst moves since MiFID II came into force include:
In proportionate terms, since MiFID II came into effect European brokers have shrunk their analyst teams at least three times more than their US counterparts. We have seen a 12% loss of analysts in Europe vs a 4% loss in the US.
For both Europe and the US the majority of analyst losses took place in 2018 and 2019; increases in 2020 YTD do not outweigh the previous losses.
Of the analysts lost by US banks from 2018-2020, 61% covered US markets, equating to 172 individuals. Of the analysts gained over the same period of time, 16.3% (equivalent to 46 individuals) are in the UK. In other words, US banks have shrunk their local teams but continued to invest in their international presence, increasing the number of analysts in the UK [who also cover Europe from the UK] and Asia, to cater to customer demand for research coverage outside the US
Of the analysts lost by European Banks from 2018-2020, 66% covered the US; this equates to 121 individuals. However, European banks increased their UK analyst teams by 8.2% over the same period of time, equivalent to 15 individuals. This means European banks have consolidated back to their core markets, providing pan-European research coverage from the UK and withdrawing from the US.
From 2018-2020, US brokers in aggregate have grown their analyst teams covering Financials (+6%) and Real Estate (+10%), and shrunk in the other sectors, with Energy (-23%) and Industrials (-21%) being hardest hit.
In 2020 alone, US banks have increased their analyst teams across 6 sectors, with highest gains across Financials (+18%), IT and Real Estate (with 9% each)
In Europe, brokers have shrunk their teams across all sectors between 2018 and 2020, with Energy and Healthcare being hardest hit, with an 18% loss of analysts in each area
In Europe, in 2020 alone, the downward trend continues with Healthcare shrinking 14%, Financials and Energy each losing 7% of their analyst teams and IT being the exception, showing a slight increase of 2%.
The Analyst Mapping dashboard has already been rolled out to 35-40 clients and will be complete to all Substantive Research clients by the end of the year. Additional areas of functionality will be added to the dashboard over time, driven by user requests for more granular insights into the research and analyst sectors.
Global Research Market Lost Years of Experience since MiFID II
Substantive Research analyst mapping study examines the juniorisation of analyst research across the US and Europe
London, 8 March 2021: Substantive Research, the research discovery and research spend analytics provider for the buy-side, today published findings of its latest study analysing the juniorisation of analyst research, which began with the implementation of MiFID II in January 2018. The analyst mapping exercise provides evidence that the research market globally has lost over 7,500 years (net) of analyst experience in the last three years.
The study was carried out using Substantive Research’s Analyst Mapping tool, which allows asset managers to gain an aggregated view of banks’ analyst moves, their seniority and sector coverage of relevance to them. Managers can clearly see which brokers are investing or disinvesting in experienced analysts covering the sectors and asset classes pertinent to their strategies and allocate their research budgets more efficiently, to ensure the quality of research is maintained.
In its first analyst mapping report published in November 2020, Substantive Research found that since MiFID II came into effect, in proportionate terms, European brokers have shrunk their analyst teams at least three times more than their US counterparts. There has been a 12% loss of analysts in Europe vs a 4% loss in the US, as buyside budgets and research pricing have decreased globally but more significantly in Europe. Furthermore, in December 2020 Substantive Research also published research showing that the value of analyst meetings had fallen by 47% since COVID-19 had hit the market.
In this second analyst mapping study, Substantive Research specifically focused on the experience levels of the analyst teams – as analyst tenure is a key factor in delivering research quality – and how this has changed since January 2018.
The latest analyst mapping study findings include:
European brokers and banks lost net 3,074 years of experience since MiFID II came into effect, whilst US brokers and banks lost net 4,606 years of experience. The US universe of analysts in the study was 1.8 times larger than the European universe, showing that the effect amongst European firms is more pronounced.
The experience levels of analysts lost to banks and brokers in the three year period averages out at just under 7 years per analyst, whereas the average experience levels for those gained is just under 2 years.
The drain in experience from the research market has begun to stabilise in 2020, with the loss slowing to 928 years over the twelve-month period.
When comparing banks with their research-driven premium broker competitors in the research market, the experience drain is very different, with US and European banks losing 6,287 years of experience compared with premium brokers losing 1,393 years of experience.
The picture varies significantly if you look at each research provider. For example, one provider X has a net gain of 17 analysts since MiFID II came into effect, versus a competitor Y that has a net loss of 138. If you look at experience levels (to check if the provider with the net gain has hired junior or senior staff), provider X has actually lost only 50 years of experience compared to provider Y’s 1328.
In this study, the sample size of current active analysts is 5,300, taken from the largest and most prominent banks and premium brokers, who command approximately 60% of average research budgets.
Mike Carrodus, CEO of Substantive Research, said:
“Whilst we see a significant reduction in the analyst experience levels that the wider market is providing, when you look individually, broker by broker, the picture varies dramatically. It is clear that some firms have used MiFID II and COVID-19’s structural shocks to the research market as an opportunity to gain market share, which is paying dividends for them already.”
Carrodus added: “It’s only by understanding the experience levels that these analyst teams represent, as well as their staffing numbers, that asset managers can align with the providers committed to offering high value, differentiated research in the areas they require. When asset managers combine this with an understanding of research pricing trends, they can truly maximise the value of their significant research budgets.”
ESG Data Supply Survey
Substantive Research has been mapping the research provider universe since January 2015 for over 70 asset managers in Europe and the US. The ESG research and data market is where this map has been evolving most quickly in response to needs and available budget from investors.
Whilst there are a handful of incumbents in the ESG data market, the market place is opening up to a large number of new entrants offering data supply in a range of different areas of the ESG universe. Our ESG Discovery Database has already highlighted new launches designed to address the buy side’s current frustrations with the existing landscape. We often hear from clients that their data requirements are not being met by their existing ESG data providers.
In order to ensure that our ESG mapping messages are insightful and actionable, we have been conducting a short survey amongst our asset management clients that seeks to collate their underlying data needs and requirements. It has been a fascinating process with great response, so we have opened this up to any buy side firms interested in participating. All participants will receive a full report on the survey and the key takeaways.