FAQs

Spend management is the end to end process of managing where and how money is spent across an organisation. Collecting, collating, maintaining, categorising, and evaluating this spend to be able to make decisions. It includes decisions on supply chains and all money spent with external organisations in association with the operations of the organisation.

Spend Under Management is any spend of an organisation that is under some form of control. This usually means that someone within Procurement has in-depth knowledge of this spend and is able to influence the supply chain and level of spend, as well as other sustainability and governance aspects of the spend.

Spend analysis is the practice of reviewing procurement spend across an organisation. Seeking opportunities to improve in many domains. This includes costs, efficiencies, sustainability or to improve the overall supply chain. Typically, it includes visualisation of data to assist in making better organisational decisions relating to sourcing and suppliers.

A B2B Marketplace is an online marketplace where organisations can engage in trade. Organisations can engage around many products and services, with buyers able to find sellers and sellers able to find buyers. Effectively connecting multiple sellers and buyers in either a public and/or private ecosystem.

eProcurement is the software-based automation of procurement processes and the automation of user processes to enable them to easily make purchases.

Source-to-pay (S2P) is a process that starts with identifying suppliers, negotiating with these suppliers, and then contracting with the supplier to supply goods or services to an organisation. It then culminates in final payment for those goods and includes all processes that may be involved between identification and payment.

Purchase to pay is all the processes that occur from procuring goods and services, through to paying for these goods and services. It is effectively the purchasing process and excludes processes associated with sourcing activities to identify and contract with suppliers.

As might be obvious from the wording, it is the electronic or online version of an auction. With the bidding for goods or services carried out purely online.

Invoice matching ensures that a valid purchase order has been found, that matches the invoiced amount, before making any payments.

A Three-Way Match refers to the validation of an invoice against a valid purchase order and the goods or services received. It is three-way as the order(1), invoice(2) and goods/services received(3) are all checked against each other to confirm that a payment can be made.

Direct Procurement refers to those goods or services that an organisation needs to fulfil its primary business offer, whether that is goods or services. For example, if you produce a toaster it would be any parts that are associated with being able to make the toaster, as well as any services that you may need to source to complete the process of manufacture.

Indirect procurement refers to operational spend that is not directly related to the primary business offer of an organisation. That is spend that is necessary for the organisation to function. This would include the purchase of consumables and renting photocopiers for example. It would also include Marketing spend and contracting cleaners. It would not include the purchase of parts for the products you sell (this would be Direct Spend.)

Tail spend is typically associated with Indirect Spend. However, it is a term that is distinct in that it is trying to categorise spend that is low value and possibly infrequent. Overall this spend may add up to significant numbers, however it is usually associated with being difficult to identify and manage, with people within an organisation making purchases by many different means: credit cards, expenses, cash and through catalogue accounts.

Maverick Spend is spend that is associated with individuals in an organisation who bypass normal purchasing processes. Often this is because the process itself is cumbersome and the individual chooses not to use it. It may also be that the individual wants to select a specific supplier and by bypassing the process they can ensure a particular supplier receives the business.

Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) covers all aspects of interactions between a supplier and your organisation. SRM seeks to optimise the business relationship and maximise value, to the benefit of all parties. It includes segmentation of suppliers (categorising to define the level of importance for example), supplier strategy development and supplier strategy execution.

A supply chain is the connection of organizations, people, activities, information, and resources involved in supplying a product or service. Knowledge of how this supply chain works is critical to be able to proactively manage supply. It is also critical to know which organisations are involved in supplying your organisation for many reasons, including ethical and sustainable issues. It is also important to understand the risk associated with the supply chain, in terms of how the failure of one part of the chain would impact all other parts and your organisation.

Supplier management is the entire process that delivers value for money from what an organization spends with its suppliers. It includes how an organisation engages and interacts with its suppliers to optimise on the supply of goods and services.

Cloud-based procurement is the placing of automated procurement processes in the cloud. This enables access anywhere at any time to these processes. Typically cloud-based automation is delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS), which means you subscribe to the automation service, as opposed to purchasing the software outright.

PFEP, Plan for Every Part, is used to define a plan (at part level) for the most efficient replenishment and movement of each and every part used in a business through the complete Supply/Value Chain.

eSourcing is linked in with eProcurement. eSourcing focusing on the vendor side of the automation process, with the ability for suppliers to add and change details relating to their offer. Plus, supporting a range of possible electronic engagements with these suppliers

Ecological and ethical concerns tend to be associated with Sustainability. However, the word sustainable clearly defines the intent: Sustainable Procurement is focused on ensuring that the goods and services can continue to be supplied without depleting all resources or impacting in a negative way on any ecosystem, within the supply chain, causing disruption of this supply. Ensuring supply is sustainable without end.

For a company with immature Procurement processes who may be at the start of their journey of Digital Transformation, this is an ideal starting point that requires little or no configuration from the start. Claritum's cloud suite can be implemented and used off-the-shelf from day-one.

Companies with more mature Procurement processes, who may have a clearer idea of what their Digital Transformation looks like; Claritum’s flexibility and ability to tailor the system to align with your organisational processes makes Claritum perfect for smaller organisations.

Also, from a cost perspective, Claritum offers better flexibility: with ERP based platforms typically prohibitively expensive for an SME and often with little or no flexibility to adapt to an organisation’s operational model.

Plus, if changes or integrations are required, Claritum is much more likely to be able to respond to these, given the open nature of the platform.

Claritum addresses all sizes of business by offering a scalable & affordable cloud/user licensed model. Businesses of all sizes can gain most from using the cloud suite: making savings across all their purchases & driving efficiency gains across the organisation, that pays for the solution.

You can unlock Procurement savings, drive productivity & efficiencies by automating and digitising specific procurement & supply-chain workflows. By using the approach of marginal gains, you decide which processes or workflows can be automated, and by using role based saved searches, users can focus on only those actions that need addressing within the process.

For best practice, by using Claritum's cloud suite to drive continuous improvement, you are not only delivering savings, but providing your users the tools they need to procure.

Claritum’s cloud suite takes care of the buying, so your team spend less time on transactional activity. This frees up resources to drive profitability within your organisation; develop environmental or ethical initiatives; or engage with suppliers to develop stronger business relationships.

Using Claritum brings more spend under management, with all category, project and bespoke spending now captured. Significant savings can be achieved across an organisation.

Also, spend can be consolidated across many regional offices and users. Allowing volume to be leveraged for price breaks and negotiations.

There are two types of savings, the first is financial (hard) ranging from 8% through to more than 20% across all Procurement activities. The variation is mostly dependent on how efficient your team has been historically in managing costs across all processes.

The cloud suite enables Purchase Orders to be generated for suppliers and then these suppliers can access their own supplier area to view and action. This in addition to supplier invoice automation and the creation in the platform of invoices that can contribute to an expected saving of £5 per PO. So, if your creating 100 invoices per month, then you can expect a saving £500 per month.

The second type of saving is more soft savings, whereby having one cloud-based solution, and all your data in one place. Minimises costly human errors, driving process efficiencies, avoiding the need for additional human resources as your business grows.

Yes, many of Claritum’s customers have integration to other systems. These can be ERP systems, financial systems and warehousing systems for example.

Claritum has an open API that can be used for integration and Claritum is happy to engage on projects with our customers to integrate to their internal systems.

Claritum’s cloud suite is popular with customers who already have a mature best practice Procurement platform in place. In some cases, constantly changing Procurement processes or complex specification-based Procurement projects cannot be managed without the need for costly modifications. In this example, Claritum can provide a flexible, configurable alternative at a more reasonable cost that can grow with maturing processes & ever-changing requirements.

Yes, there is no hardware to purchase, and typically user-access & implementation activities are rolled-up into one flat monthly payment paid over a term of 3-5 years.

Claritum’s cloud suite, is utilised by over 150,000 users across 70 countries, with many well-known brands accessing and using Claritum regularly.

When used for Indirect purchasing, the platform is not sector or industry-specific and can be used for a range of categories

Claritum offers a unified cloud suite of software that covers a broad range of procurement functionality.

Yes, the cloud suite can be used immediately.

With the added advantage that companies can personalise content & branding in-house.

This is key to the Claritum cloud suite, which provides flexibility to configure and change workflows, for your products, services & projects.

Yes, Claritum's cloud suite be branded. In fact, your internal customers can have multiple brands on the platform. So, if your organisation operates with multiple brands you can use these appropriate to the specific organisational entity.

Also, if you are offering a purchasing service to other companies, you can use their brand on the cloud suite for when they need to access the buyer portal and make a purchase.

Yes, Claritum is very flexible in this regard and this makes us distinct from a lot of our competition who expect you to take their platform as is.

No, the system can be set up and configured remotely and training of Super Users is carried out remotely.

All Claritum employees are UK based and we do not outsource development outside of Claritum.

Yes, Claritum’s cloud suite, supports stock management. Plus, if you want to link this to your warehousing system, we can provide integration resources to assist in this process.

For example, companies who provide their customers with a catalogue of products that are made-up of kits of parts for assembly by the customer or installation team. Their biggest challenge is how to communicate that order to their warehouse ‘picking staff’ without missing a component from the order. Using Claritum to manage all of this minimizes picking errors and time & money rescheduling installations or assembly activities.

Typically, this is known as ‘Grouped Sales Order from Stock & Logistics Execution’.

Claritum's cloud suite delivers this solution out of the box, and in addition also provides the Procurement & Stock Replenishment process to those parts consumed.

Yes, Claritum's cloud suite can operate as a Business to Business Marketplace. Depending how you want to engage with potential customers, or as a supplier to engage with potential buyers, will determine which software components you need to choose.

Yes, if you want to allow customers to view your activity, the platform allows them access to these records, plus create their orders on the system.

Yes, you control access to data and any access to your instance of the platform.

Importing data from disparate systems can be challenging. Claritum can assist in the onboarding of data and helping to format data for onboarding.

Any Integration to an ERP system can allow for supplier records to remain on this system if necessary, removing any duplication and potential errors in data.

Typical set-up and onboarding of data takes days or weeks dependent on your specific requirements. Though the use of the cloud suite can commence immediately after set-up, which typically takes 2 weeks, and proceed across all categories as the data is loaded.

Yes, Claritum offers training for Super Admin Users. These Super Admin Users can then train other users throughout your organisation as needed.

There is also a comprehensive Knowledge base you will have access to, consisting of training videos, and how-to-guides.

Claritum can hold rate cards for specific suppliers and through accessing these comparisons can be made. However, we do not currently offer a service to obtain commercial price guides.

Attachments can be held against suppliers. So, yes contract terms can be held within the system. Also, adding rate cards and pricing ensures that, at least in this context, the terms of the contract are being adhered to.

Yes, you can create customer portals that operate independently for this purpose. These being kept up to date centrally. Also, you can specify taxes, languages and currencies to apply in these cases.

Procurement can stay engaged in the process, with rules set as to when Procurement involvement is required. The Procurement team can access their data and explore down to the specification level within this data.

You can brand & tailor the purchase orders as required.

No, the Claritum system can also operate using emails, if there is no electronic option.

Yes, such requests can be handled through the platform.

Typical numbers are in the order of £50 per order, based on time saved.

The system does not search for suppliers on the Internet. However, once suppliers are registered on the platform, searches for suppliers will show up potential suppliers based on their profiles. Claritum's cloud suite allows you to send requests to these suppliers and receive responses, to qualify their ability to supply.

No, the system holds all data and backs-up data.

Yes, as purchasing goods and services is so much easier using the Claritum cloud suite. Plus, Procurement time saved can be used to make the organisation more efficient and effective in its supply chain.

Yes, you can use the cloud suite to trigger payments and to adjust payments for an early payment discount according to any negotiated terms.