Interfacing & Automation

Automating inventory & spend management

Many firms still rely on complex spreadsheets or other tools supporting manual processes to manage their enterprise subscriptions. By automating inventory management across the range of subscription services — such as market data, research, software & information services — firms can eliminate these manual systems and save time, money and resources.

Automating inventory control allows firms to analyze existing costs and predict upcoming spend relating to information and subscription services consumed across the enterprise. This in turn supports accurate reporting of usage and cost data to your users, financial controllers and auditors.

It allows you to deliver on cost transparency, and manage risk and compliance. Finally, this approach supports supplier negotiations with evidence-based intelligence, helping to optimize contract renewals.

Automated data interfaces

Our enterprise spend management system — Optimize Spend — offers a comprehensive suite of interfaces between Optimize Spend, your internal corporate systems, and your vendors’ inventory and invoicing data.

Thanks to the open structure, the interfaces seamlessly integrate your vendor and corporate data into Optimize Spend, making maintaining users, updating inventory, and processing invoices quick and painless. You can easily upload data, reconcile with what exists in Optimize Spend, and apply the changes in a matter of clicks.

Vendor-specific interfaces

With Optimize Spend’s vendor-specific interfaces you can automate loading full inventory and invoice detail from your vendors. They support a wide range of data sources delivery mechanisms, including loading & reconciling vendor electronic invoices, connecting directly to permissioning databases, price lists and direct invoicing from Bloomberg and Refinitiv.

Corporate interfaces

Optimize Spend’s interfaces for corporate systems allow you to import from, and share data with, your internal systems. It also integrates with corporate identity management and authentication systems to provide the convenience and security of single sign-on for your users.

• Human Resources interfaces – automate the upload of your employees, corporate hierarchy, cost center, and building information. Fully compatible with all major corporate ERP sources, including SAP and Oracle Financials
• Accounts Payable interfaces – automate of invoice payment requests to, and receive payment confirmation from, your accounts payable department. Compatible with AP systems from SAP, Sage, Oracle, SmartStream, Exact Software, and many more
• Single Sign-on – the simplicity and security of single sign-on, supporting both proprietary systems such as Windows Active Directory and Oracle Access Manager, and open standards such as SAML2