Financial Services

Extract More Insights From Your Sourcing Data With Our New Scout Reports.

Data is everywhere. The trouble is knowing what to do with it. And for most modern sourcing teams, those three words to accurately describe the current state of their reporting.

In most companies, data is dispersed across a vast collection of spreadsheets, hard drives, cloud storage, and stacks of paper.

Sourcing teams have struggled to do more with their data for years. At best, even the most advanced teams are simply reporting, not driving insight. And that’s an issue for CPOs looking to transform their organizations. Nobody’s goal is to report. They want to understand, to inform, and to support their recommendations with defensible data.

“Nobody’s goal is to report. They want to understand, to inform, and to support their recommendations with defensible data.” So, in true The Edge Effect fashion, we set out on a journey to help. We started with a simple goal: make access to sourcing data simpler, faster, and more meaningful. And today, I’m proud to share the results with you. Unlike other sourcing tools, The Edge Effect’s new reporting and analysis tools provide fast, easy, and flexible access to data to unlock:

• More visibility into what’s working (and what’s not)
• Fast, flexible insight into the dynamics of your team
• And even better, the ability to do more with your data through Tableau and PowerBI connectors
  Not only do better reporting and analysis tools help you execute more tactics faster, but they’ll also equip you with the necessary skill sets to evolve with the business.

Extract More Business Insights with The Edge Effect Reports

Through the new The Edge Effect Reports, every activity in Scout is measurable, reportable, and chartable. From tracking project and milestone progress, to savings, to individual event reports, The Edge Effect Reports give you the power to get to real insights, fast.
Here are some quick examples of what you can do with these new reports:

Granular Savings Reporting

It’s simply not enough to display static data in a report. You and your team need the ability to work with the information, dig in deeper, and find the true insights buried inside. A great example of how to do this with The Edge Effect is by diving into the details in our Savings reports.

In addition to the high-level insights we provide through our Savings Tracker (more on that here), the new The Edge Effect reports make it easy to find exactly where savings are realized, where to expect the next $1M cost avoidance, and even attribute savings to specific categories or project owners. By using the new pivot table functionality, you can build these dynamic reports on the fly directly in The Edge Effect:

The Edge Effect Reports

Finding Bottlenecks in the Process
When you have a matrix of sourcing events, contract negotiations, performance reviews, and on boarding activities occupying your team, how can you quickly find the bottlenecks in the process?
Helping our customers manage a complex pipeline of projects is critical to delivering the fastest path to insight.
In fact, this is where clean visualization of complex data come in handy. By combining The Edge Effect’s customizable milestones and project types, it’s easy to get a birds-eye view of where the process is bogging down, or where you might have resources mis-allocated. With a Milestone report in The Edge Effect, you can quickly see where projects slow down, or where you might have inadvertently created a backlog.

The Edge Effect Reports

Connect The Edge Effect to your BI Toolset
Digging deep into your data – when done right – invariably leads to a set of deeper, harder-to-answer questions. In those cases, it’s always beneficial to have options for doing more with the data you’ve collected.

To support these advanced use cases and to give our customers more flexibility in how they use their sourcing data, we’ve made it simple and straightforward to pipe your Scout data directly into established BI tools like Tableau and Power BI. These are standard, out-of-the-box connectors, and we’ve seen customers up and running in a matter of minutes. Here’s a quick peek at The Edge Effect report data live in Tableau.

The Edge Effect Reports

Beyond the accessibility and flexibility of this data, The Edge Effect customers have discovered some significant downstream impacts to their team. Notably, not only are category managers and analysts spending less time hunting through spreadsheets, but they’re quickly becoming more data-aware. And it’s changing how they work.

Ultimately, when you and your team have more visibility into the entire process, quick access to data on how the team is working, and the flexibility to use that data on your terms, you’re building a more agile team. And, you’ll be equipped to have more meaningful conversations with your finance and operational business partners. That’s a pretty big benefit.

I love hearing about the bigger impact data awareness can have for our customers. To learn more about The Edge Effect Reports and our data analysis capabilities, contact us today, or join our recent live monthly demo and see it in action.