Procurement is an information game. The more, and the better-informed, a team is, the better its decisions, the faster its response, and the more value it delivers to the business.
Identifying the relationships across your supplier base, and acting on them, is one of those high-leverage inputs. It quietly drives a long list of decisions throughout the strategic-sourcing process, from source to contract.
The impact
Visibility into supplier relationships across the whole procurement group changes decisions for both sides. Knowing the different entities of a parent supplier reveals the true total spend, and at scale that reshapes how you segment and manage the relationship.
True total spend
Every entity's spend rolls up to the parent, so you finally know what the supplier group is really worth to you.
Smarter segmentation
Scale changes the segment, the relationship-management style, and where deeper collaboration and innovation pay off.
Benchmark across children
Compare quality, cost and service across every child entity, and set consistent expectations across locations and business units.
Master agreements
Optimize contracts with a master supplier agreement to capture sizable, group-wide savings, while staying on top of any change.
It also raises the level of interaction between the two companies, opening the door to higher collaboration and genuinely new products and services with the parent supplier.
The challenge
This isn't a new problem, but it's one most organizations have never tackled properly. ERPs simply don't address what procurement teams actually need here, which is why a solution that absorbs spend data and turns it into the right insight is such an enabler.
- ERPs don't address procurement's real need around relationships
- Business entities are living beings, a snapshot in time won't hold
- No single source of information reveals every relationship
- Mergers and acquisitions add a layer of complexity on top
The solution
We're at the start of a new century of connectivity, and until that maturity arrives, the best enabling solutions have to connect across many sources of information and take feedback from subject-matter experts to refine and mature over time.
That's the approach we believe in. Mithra's flexible engine ingests many different data points and uses our proprietary machine-learning models to match entities and build the big picture, while letting experts add the business context only they hold.
No single source reveals every relationship. The picture is built by connecting many and kept true by the people who know the business.
What to take from it
Relationships drive sourcing decisions
Parent-child visibility feeds segmentation, benchmarking, collaboration, and contracting, the core of source-to-contract.
Treat it as living, not a snapshot
Entities change and M&A reshuffles the map; the picture has to be maintained, not captured once.
Combine many sources with expert context
Machine learning matches across sources; subject-matter experts add the context that no dataset carries.
Want to see your supplier base as a set of relationships, not a list of codes? Let us build the picture on your own data.