Systems such as EvedPay enable both suppliers and buyers to eliminate event spend costs.
- Spend management attempts to cut costs at the beginning of the source-to-settle process without considering the effects of saving further down the line.
- Meetings and events have a lot of small transactions, which can cost more to process than the money being exchanged.This reality creates a sense of urgency to lower costs.
- Many systems try to shift costs to the other guy, either the buyer or supplier, but the costs end up getting bounced back. Great solutions are able to look at the entire process and are able to minimize costs from both buyer and supplier.
Cost savings is the ultimate goal of any spend management solution, but cost savings can come in a variety of places within the source to settle process within a category. So most people think of the sourcing part of the process as driving a lot of the savings, and that’s true; in other words, using good bidding practices to source a venue or an AV supplier, getting several bids, thus making it a competitive event, as well as making your specs biddable and understandable by the suppliers definitely drives a lot of savings.
But a lot of savings in meetings and events also come farther down the line in the source-to-settle process. The more a spend category has high transactional save costs, the more it can generate savings in the rest of the process as well. So meetings and events have lots of small transactions between lots of vendors, and the actual cost of processing that transaction, whether it’s the purchase order on the buyer side, or the invoice on the supplier side, or the payment in the remittance on both sides, those transactions are often as much to handle as the dollar amount of the transaction itself! So a great spend management solution doesn’t look just at one area, it looks at that entire process and thinks about how can we take costs out of that entire process for both the buyer and the supplier? a lot of systems try to end up shifting costs between the buyer and the supplier. So they’ll tell a great story to the buyer about how much they’re going to save, but they managed to do that by shifting the costs on to the supplier. However, this is not a real solution because everybody knows that the supplier is going to figure out some way to pass those costs back onto the buyer or they’re going to go out of business. The great solutions, such as Eved, look at the entire process and think about it from both party’s perspectives, and pull those costs out rather than shifting them from one place to another.
For example: the p-card or the meeting card is a really useful tool for some types of transactions, but it does have this cost shifting element to it, which is: it’s quite attractive to the buyer, but it can be very unattractive to the supplier. Whereas the EvedPay system balances those two needs to be attractive to both parties.
