Universities across Australia are tapping into world-leading procurement tech to uncover millions in potential savings. Photo: Martin Ollman.
Australian government and large corporations are about to gain access to game-changing procurement technology that could save them millions.
Procurement consultancy firm APProQr has partnered with Finland’s Sievo — a procurement analytics solution “unlike anything else in the world”.
APProQr director Glenn Elliot says they discovered the “Rolls-Royce of procurement data analytics” while hunting for a technological solution for a government client who wanted better purview of their procurement data.
“That’s why information is the most important part of negotiation and procurement. When you focus on the data, we make more informed decisions,” he says. “There’s a reason Sievo is a phenomenally powerful and successful solution — it’s unlike anything else in the world.”
Sievo’s data extraction tool plugs into an enterprise’s existing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) environment, extracting relevant data and automatically filtering out sensitive data to provide insights in digestible, visual formats, allowing for speedy, well-informed decision-making.
Beyond that, the system flags in clear, concise and demonstrable fashion, a hierarchy of potential savings — and all within a supremely secure environment.
“It has global protection standards in place, and even non-sensitive data is encrypted to a higher standard than the Australian Government would ever require,” Glenn says.
Sievo achieves its outcomes by leveraging its advanced AI capabilities across enormous volumes of data.
The company processes spend data equivalent to more than two per cent of the global GDP annually — trillions of dollars’ worth of transactions, and more than 100 times more data than the average global enterprise.
The technology is designed for enterprises with $1 billion-plus in revenue and embraced by organisations across diverse sectors from pharmaceuticals to universities — industries with big procurement saving potential and global reach.
“That’s why it’s ideal for the Australian public sector,” Glenn says. “Every government department — and a number of large private corporations — would benefit from this. If you have large-scale procurement, you’ll save money.”
For every dollar invested, Sievo delivers an average of $63 in value.
APProQr director Glenn Elliot describes Finnish procurement solution Sievo as the “Rolls-Royce of procurement data analytics”. Photo: Supplied.
Already the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) has approved Sievo (via APProQr) for inclusion on the Whole-of-Australian-Government Software Marketplace.
For eligible buyers, this opens a streamlined procurement pathway to bring Sievo’s global leading “procurement analytics superpower” to their procurement spend data — turning it into clear, actionable savings.
Meanwhile the Australasian Universities Procurement Network (AUPN) — an organisation charged with raising the procurement maturity of the Australian and New Zealand universities — was the first adopter of Sievo on this side of the world.
With more than 40 universities under its purview, procurement functions vary widely in capability — from highly strategic to very basic.
“The same logic applies to the procurement data quality within our universities,” AUPN co-chair Andrew Peacock says. “And data is so important to procurement people.”
The reason is, the university’s negotiating platform is only as strong as the data it’s founded on.
“If you’re going into a negotiation with a vendor, you want to be as informed as possible,” Andrew says. “You want to understand things like volume, spend and associated and parallel spend requirements around that supplier, to negotiate effectively and get the best value outcome.”
In AUPN’s search for a global data cleansing and consolidation provider, Sievo quickly and clearly came to the fore.
“They operate at a world-class level. Their machine learning capability, enabled by sheer volume, is phenomenal,” Andrew says.
“They can take the dirtiest of data and cleanse it to a high enough standard that you’d be happy to present those insights to executives and say ‘here’s what and where we’re spending and here are the opportunities to deliver better value’.
“Having the full picture on relative spend in any category, and an understanding of any one supplier’s penetration into the sector, is incredibly useful. You have a very different negotiating strategy with a supplier operating in 10 per cent of the sector than one operating in 90 per cent of it.”
AUPN has implemented or is in the process of implementing the Sievo solution in more than half of Australia’s universities, with more in the pipeline.
The goal is to optimise collaborative buying power by rolling it out across the board. And while implementing a new system across 50-plus universities might seem an onerous task, Andrew says AUPN quickly found its groove.
“The challenge for us was that while universities have a lot of similarities, no two are the same. Implementation at one location is easy but to replicate that across dozens, there’s always going to be challenges on the ground,” he says.
“What we’ve found, however, is once we had three or four running, a snowball effect quickly kicked in. We can identify potential challenges quickly.”
Andrew says Sievo now underpins numerous AUPN functions, allowing it to respond in an effective and targeted way.
“It’s a bit of a superpower.”
For more information, visit APProQr.
