IDC: Intelligent Spend Management key for CFOs

Andy Watson
SAP Concur’s Andy Watson points out, that given the global economic situation following the COVID-19 pandemic, management of spend has never been more important: “We really have to become smart now about how we manage our spend, so that we can continue to be the partner that drives success within the company.”

According to Daniel Zoe Jimenez, Associate Vice President and APAC Head of Digital Transformation, Future Enterprise & SMB at International Data Corporation (IDC), by 2022, over 50% of Asia-Pacific GDP will be digitalised, with growth in every industry driven by digitally-enhanced products, services, and offerings.

He said this during a Web seminar (webinar) on intelligent spend management (ISM) moderated by Laura Houldsworth, Managing Director, Southeast Asia of SAP Concur.

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Also present as panellists during the webinar streamed recently were Andy Watson, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Asia Pacific Japan and Greater China at SAP Concur; Goh Seng Ti, the President of the Association of Corporate Treasurers and General Manager at Isuzu Motors Asia; and Ghamazy Rashid, a partner and SG Accounting Operations Leader at Deloitte Singapore.

During the first segment of the webinar, Jimenez shared some insights from the SAP Concur-sponsored white paper “The Future of Spend Management: Approaches, Opportunities and Challenges in a Digital World” published by IDC.


“What this means for company CEOs is that half of their revenues will be derived from digital products and services,” he noted. IDC conducted a survey with CEOs and CFOs around the region concerning their future priorities in light of this, there were two strategic priorities that CFOs and CEOs shared in common; the future of trust, and the future of work.

“CFOs highlighted the need to create a dynamic working model so that we can shift the way our organisations look at efficiency and productivity into more of performance moving forward.”

IDC’s holistic strategy to deal with the future of work revolved around the 3 tenets of work – the work culture, the workforce, and the workspace.

“Work culture is all about rebalancing the skillset – the skill portfolio of the organisation – and more importantly, having that digital mindset. Workforce transformation is not only about automation, which is really relevant these days, but it is also about augmentation of the workforce capabilities, that is bringing intelligence into processes, such as machine learning to AI. Workspace transformation is about empowering employees with the right technologies and tools, so that they can become more productive and more collaborative these days.”

The IDC white paper was based on the Intelligent Spend Management Survey that the company conducted in July/August 2019. The survey polled over 800 businesses worldwide on spend management approaches, top challenges and unmet needs, and intelligent spend management product concept reaction.

“Procurement is the largest area of spend for any type of process-centric organisation; despite that, many organisations are mismanaging that area, because there are multiple spend categories, multiple business units, and multiple countries,” Jimenez expounds on one of the survey’s primary findings. “Most of those will have different processes, different governance, different ways of collecting data and using it, and hence they can’t have that single source of truth when it comes to spend.”

Jimenez further notes that CFOs highlighted excessive logistics costs and high inventory costs as amongst the top challenges in controlling and managing spend. “There is also a limited ability for reporting drill-down, which means that you cannot really look at your past or common expenses; more importantly, many organisations are using spreadsheets to keep track of their spend.”

When IDC looked into why these challenges occurred, it found out that 63% of organisations are currently using individual processes for each type of spend instead of using a single process for all types of spend. “Not surprisingly, 93% of organisations say there is room for improvement.”

Jimenez also notes that many organisations are starting to shift their legacy mindsets with those that infuse more of that intelligence.

“The journey towards ISM is all about converging workflows from finance, procurement, IT, and supply chain, so that you can have a single visibility into all things spend in your organisation. In fact, 93% of organisations say that they are finding that important. IDC found out that 76% of organisations are buying or thinking about buying a platform that can unify all this spend into a single technology solution over in the next couple of years,” he concludes.

During the panel discussion following Jimenez’s presentation, SAP Concur’s Andy Watson points out that given the global economic situation following the COVID-19 pandemic, management of spend has never been more important.

“We really have to become smart now about how we manage our spend, so that we can continue to be the partner that drives success within the company,” Watson explains, noting that having the technology that provides real-time access to spend data provides CFOs the ability to react and make a real impact on the strategies and objectives of their companies, especially in this era of globalisation.

Isuzu’s Goh Seng Ti, concurring with Watson, also added that the CFO’s role has been shifting and becoming increasingly more complex and wider in scope over time.

“As Andy mentioned, CFOs are tasked to know about taxes, regulations, transfer pricing – we need to know about the different accounting standards in the different jurisdictions, and we also need to know about the macroeconomic and geopolitical situations that are developing every day. Look at the recent COVID situation and the numerous interventions by the central banks; CFOs have to have an answer. CFOs are increasingly becoming the source of knowledge for a lot of solutions.”

Meanwhile, Ghamazy Rashid from Deloitte believes that companies will begin investing in technologies that help to automate various finance tasks that are currently still done manually such as reconciliation and claims processing in order to provide decision makers with timely data.

“The technology is already out there, such as SAP Concur,” he adds.

As information starts becoming more accessible in real-time, he also points out that these decision makers will be able to look at the information directly from the systems, instead of approaching Finance for reports.

Those who are interested to watch the webinar may do so at https://bit.ly/3aI4q7C .