“Get it right now and you’re saving yourself some more time down the line.”
Susan Walsh Classification Guru set up her own company three years ago when she left her job in data classification, and wasn’t sure where to turn next. Her confidence and ability to classify spend data for businesses solidified her decision to start up on her own.
In episode 15 of Talent Talks, Martin and Susan Walsh dive deep into the meaning of spend data and classification, as well as winding back to last weeks’ topic of personal branding, which Susan has worked on a lot over the last year… this includes talk of her love of pyjamas and pink.
This episode of Talent Talks covers:
- The definition of Spend Data
- Money saving in monitoring and data entry
- Future of the procurement industry
- Underestimating procurement as a skill
- Importance of data quality
Links & References:
- Susan Walsh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanewalsh/
- The Classification Guru: https://www.theclassificationguru.com
“Yeah, it was quite therapeutic classifying things and giving us some order and shape.”
“That is one of my favourites because you can have like 100,000 rows of data, but actually, there might be 10 different variants of nuts, bolts and screws in there. So you can actually classify quite a lot quite quickly, and I would do that using keyword searches. It’s also really great when you find abbreviations of things that you know that a soft software wouldn’t pick up on.“
“The biggest thing is cost savings. A lot of people spend a lot of time in their top 80% of value but actually, there’s a lot of opportunity within the tail as well. But people don’t have the time or the inclination to go through that themselves because it is literally so many rows and you can have line items of like £5 or £1.25. And there is a perception that it’s not worth it. But to me, I always think that yes, it’s tail spend, but it’s not necessarily tail spend in the future, it could be one of your biggest suppliers down the line. So, you know, get it right now and you’re saving yourself some more time down the line.”
“I found with procurement, everyone is so busy. It doesn’t matter what industry they’re in. They’re just firefighting to either save their business or get as much GP out as possible. So I’ve just backed off, and let them kind of do what they need to do so that they can come to me when they need something.”
“I think that’s when people will start looking at how can we save more money? How can we just cost why we’re using 50 suppliers when we only need like two or three? And all that will start to come through because I can’t really see many people going back to the office this year.”
“ I speak to procurement people all the time, who see the value in what I do. But then further up the chain, they’ve got a relationship with the bigger consultancies or they just see it as a cost, whereas I say data is an investment, you’re saving so much time and money down the line.”
