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In this blog post, we will explore common contract management challenges and introduce you to Ignite Contracts, a powerful contract data management  tool that revolutionizes the way you manage contracts.

Vi opplever at mange fortsatt ikke har startet eller er ferdig med arbeidet rundt aktsomhetsvurderinger, og ønsker i denne bloggen å dele noen av erfaringene vi har gjort oss det siste året for å sikre at du kan komme i mål. Det er mulig å adressere kravene til Åpenhetsloven på en effektiv og robust måte hvis man går frem på riktig måte. Her er våre tips til deg!

We are thrilled to announce that Ferd AS, a leading Norwegian investment company committed to sustainable development, has chosen Ignite Procurement to manage its CO2 emissions and supplier due diligence social risk assessments.

Lov om virksomheters åpenhet og arbeid med grunnleggende menneskerettigheter og anstendige arbeidsforhold, eller Åpenhetsloven for kort, er en norsk lov som ble vedtatt av stortinget i 2021 og trådte i kraft fra 1. Juli 2022. Hovedformålet til loven er å fremme virksomheters respekt for grunnleggende menneskerettigheter og anstendige arbeidsforhold, og at allmenheten har tilgang til informasjon om hvordan selskaper jobber mot dette.  

A procurement leader’s guide to successfully implementing sustainable procurement and driving value.

Norge har vært i front på bærekraft i mange år og 10. juni 2021 vedtok Stortinget en ny lov: Åpenhetsloven, som trådte i kraft 1. juli i år. I denne videoen og artikkelen vil Bendik og Anders svare deg på de spørsmålene du kanskje har om Åpenhetsloven og gi deg noen råd til hvordan du kan komme i gang.

Procurement teams have an important mission: keep prices in check. But in times of rising inflation, keeping prices low can seem like a daunting challenge. This blog offers tips on how procurement professionals can fight inflation and add value to their company's bottom line. 

A comprehensive guide on how to reduce procurement costs, written to provide you with ideas, tips and strategies to help you uncover hidden procurement spend.

The Norwegian Transparency Act or Åpenhetsloven, came into effect in July 2022. If you are an enterprise operating within Norway or elsewhere in Europe, this article helps you know what this act means for your company and how it affects your business operations.

Did you know that every time you make a purchase for your business, it falls into one of two categories? Direct spend and indirect spend are different ways to categorize the purchases you make for your business. Read on ahead to learn how each affects your business.

The world has been turned upside down since the pandemic laid waste to global supply chains, and now the situation has gotten worse. The unfolding of the war in Ukraine has created a dire situation for global supply chains. This tempest will cause ripple effects that will eventually spill over into supply chains around the world. The same goes for your business, especially if you  ignore procurement risk management.

There's one thing procurement professionals are always in search of, it's clarity. They certainly want lots and lots of it. And what better way to get clarity than from a good old-fashioned cube? That's right—we're talking about a spend cube, which is a powerful tool that provides insight into the total value of spend per category, the number of suppliers each category has, and more.

Procurement is a complex field, full of jargon, but we're here for you. That's why we have created this encyclopedia which can be your quick reference tool. This glossary is handy for people who want to learn more about procurement and what it means to work in this area.

Seeing all your spend data in one place can inspire a dramatic change in how you manage your business. It's even more useful if you also organize that data by supplier, categories, items buyer, then view it in real-time. You'll want to refer back to this information again and again! Yet, only a few organizations are able to get a detailed view of their spending. And this lack of spend visibility comes with a hefty price tag.

Where do the products you use come from? How are they made and transported? Who supplies your products? Do they use sustainable methods and materials? Are their carbon emissions high? Do you have a baseline with a heat map of scope 3 emissions in your company? If you’re looking to go net-zero, finding answers to these questions is crucial but not as hard as you might think.

Not sure how to choose and set the right KPIs for your procurement organization? Here we are with some guidance as well as 20 most important procurement KPI examples that you can use in your company.

2021 is soon going to be over. Though there's still enough time left for surprises to unfold, most of us would agree that this year has been more stable and less erratic than 2020.  Does that mean there's nothing new for procurement? No new challenges, changes, or trends? Well, if you ask us, we would say it's only a matter of perspective. 

As maverick spending, or rogue buying, can account for up to 80% of a company's total spend, the inherent savings potential is often substantial. We have shared five steps to help you to get control of your maverick spend.

Strategic Sourcing is a systemic process that continuously re-evaluates a company's purchasing activities to acquire goods or services that are of strategic importance to a company.

Through multiple procurement projects, we've participated in hundreds of negotiation meetings with suppliers, that's provided us with valuable insight into how to ensure a successful renegotiation process. In this article, we share six practical tips on how to secure sustainable, long-term results from a renegotiation.

This blog will walk you through all you need to know about spend management and why managing spend is important for companies of all sizes.

During our webinar on “A Practical Roadmap to Procurement Savings of 14 October 2021, we were very happy to receive your questions! In this blog, we answer them.

Organizations conduct supplier evaluations both to qualify the potential suppliers and to assess relationships with the existing ones. Supplier evaluation represents one of the most important decisions in a company to remain competitive, especially in times like now when markets are changing very fast.

There are several procurement levers you can utilize to drive cost reductions. Bundling, or consolidating spend, is one of them. But how do you use procurement analytics to identify bundling opportunities?

When running a business, you need to think about thousands of factors that can contribute to or add value to it. Among these factors, one of the most important is how you monitor and control your spending. Irrespective of the industry you are in, spend management is a process that makes sure money leaving your company is appropriately tracked and accounted for regularly.

You can gain more insight from your data than you think! In this article, we take a closer look at the most common sources of spend and procurement data.

Procurement teams continuously focus on minimizing transaction costs and costs related to the purchase-to-pay (P2P) process. Although the trend is moving towards automated and self-guided P2P processes, there still might be some opportunities to explore.

Every procurement professional wants to mitigate as many procurement risks as possible, but before taking the risks head-on, you need to understand what you are up against. We have identified and put together a list of the top 5 procurement risks that all procurement professionals should be aware of.

Understanding and analyzing your company’s spend structure is often the first step towards laying the foundation of a data-driven procurement organization. But for many companies who've jumped into the analytics bandwagon, translating analytics to fact-based actions that enable realizing procurement savings is a tough nut to crack. This article will discuss some promising cost-reduction strategies enabled by analytics that can grow your procurement savings exponentially.

Businesses nowadays are emphasizing upon the importance of organizing procurement functions. Why? Because effective and efficient procurement can be the difference between a company’s astounding success or downfall. Most of you must be convinced or are already looking out for ways to organize procurement functions for your business. Here are our six expert tips to help you start building a modern procurement function.

When a procurement organization's vision doesn't look beyond savings, the chances of getting stuck in a tactical shell increase. Sometimes, transactional issues might appear critical for operations, but in reality, they are short-term and with limited impact. To realize its full value potential, procurement must overcome its evolutionary tactical barrier and become a more strategic function.

You've all heard about procurement analytics and the enormous gains it can bring to your company. You also know how important it's to acquire data analytics skills and bring them into your decision-making for being an efficient leader. Still, there's something that blocks you from taking that first step towards your procurement analytics journey. If it's so, then you're in good company. This article will share procurement expert Kjetil Istad's views on what straightforward steps leaders can take to substantially outperform their industry and competitors.

The concept of tail spend analytics is widely acknowledged but seldom optimized by the procurement departments. As for most organizations, tail spend management is an uphill battle. This article will spotlight tail spend and how the right mix of advanced analytics and technology can help you tame the beast.

2020 has been a year that's made companies across the world completely rethink the way they do procurement. As opposed to the common belief that the pandemic has made the environment more challenging, in reality it's made the need for procurement transformation all the more critical.

The procurement industry is undergoing a rapid transformation. Once considered a laggard in the race to digital, the industry is evolving into a strategic function that's driven entirely by data and insights. While data is crucial to driving these transformations, bad, unorganized, or dirty data is considered no lesser than a bane for the procurement industry.

In a recent bachelor thesis, Ingeborg Bakke and Kristina Ulla highlight an untapped potential within strategic procurement across Norway's aquaculture sector.

Bundling is a vital procurement lever to help drive cost reductions across your organization. Follow these six steps to succeed and maximize savings during the process.

Maverick spending is probably a well-known problem for most organizations and procurement professionals. Let's look at how you can utilize procurement analytics to identify such challenges.

Many construction companies are still in the stone age when it comes to strategic procurement – despite its massive influence on the business.

Manufacturing companies of all types face several unique procurement challenges. With a dated spend management solution (or no solution in place at all!), managing these challenges can be very difficult.

As a spend management solution provider, we often meet procurement teams that are already using or thinking about investing in business intelligence (BI) solutions. But how well do BI tools support their procurement efforts?

Procurement analytics comes in many shapes and forms. Let us take a look at some analyzes that you can use for identifying renegotiation opportunities.

In this article, we look at five steps to identify and prioritize cost-saving measures that increase the likelihood of success.

One of the challenges in procurement is consolidating and harmonizing available data to make more fact-based decisions.

Spend analysis is all about gaining the necessary insights to drive fact-based, smarter, and sustainable procurement decisions.

Working data-driven and fact-based with your procurement costs is crucial to identifying and realizing savings.

Selecting and implementing procurement measures is a vital part of a holistic approach to strategic procurement.

Categorizing your spend is the starting point for category management and a more data-driven approach to procurement. In this article, we'll share some practical tips on how to get started.

Managing your contracts and improving compliance is essential to ensure that savings are realized. It also drives supplier collaboration and helps avert conflicts during the contract period.

You can use multiple levers to reduce your procurement costs. One commercial lever, often referred to as a "quick win", is to renegotiate your existing contracts.

The Kraljic Matrix is a useful tool ​​when defining relevant procurement levers for the different categories. Let's take a closer look on how to address strategic categories.

Many organizations talk about category management, yet relatively few have implemented this strategic approach to procurement. Implementing category management may seem challenging, but our experience suggests that a few, basic principles can take you a long way.

Classifying, or categorizing, spend provides you with more control, better overview and detailed insights. In addition, it's a vital part of category management and strategic procurement.

Are you developing a category strategy, but not sure where to start? Follow these six steps to create an action-based category strategy for your company.