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Business agility depends on staying on top of spend.

As recent history has shown, change is both constant and can happen in an instant. Keeping a close eye on costs and improving your cash flow is critical to your company¡¯s ability to both weather challenges and embrace new opportunity.

Truly effective spend management means having control over every dollar ¨C no matter the department, employee, location, spend category, or payment method. Any gaps in your processes or spend data limit your visibility and control ¨C opening the door to risk and unnecessary costs.

But achieving total spend control doesn¡¯t happen overnight. It¡¯s often a gradual process that involves coordination between departments ¨C especially finance and IT. Your goal should be to connect all types of spend, digitalize all your spend management processes, and empower everyone across your company to make smart spending choices that meet requirements while also protecting the bottom line. With the right spend management capabilities, you can stay a step ahead of the competition ¨C no matter what the world throws at you.

The question is: When it comes to spend visibility and control, where does your business stand?

To help you find out, we¡¯ve created the Business Agility Assessment tool.

With just seven short questions, we can help you evaluate your spend management processes.

To begin with, we¡¯ll look at your expense and invoice management. Are you still using paper-, e-mail-, and spreadsheet-based processes and manually checking for errors? Or are you fully automated ¨C from receipt and PO capture to intelligent exception flagging and workflow approvals ¨C all through mobile devices? Or maybe your business falls somewhere in between.

We¡¯ll also explore how integrated your spend management processes are with each other and with your back-end ERP, HR, and CRM systems. This can range from having various, unconnected systems for expense, invoice, and travel management to integration across your IT landscape, enabling unified processes, holistic data, and deep cash flow insight. Your answers, of course, will help shed light on how reliable your data is and how fast you can get it when making time-sensitive business decisions and identifying potential red flags that could lead to increased risk.

In addition to evaluating your spend management processes and data, we¡¯ll also take a look at your level of spend control. For example, do you have a hard time predicting cash flow? Do you find yourself paying late fees to vendors, missing out on discounts, or keep up with employee reimbursement schedules? Or do you feel like you have full control ¨C including the ability to quickly audit expense reports, catch duplicate invoices before they¡¯re paid, and flag noncompliant spend before it happens?

Finally, we¡¯ll ask about your spend management solution provider. Do they have the technology, services, and support you need to achieve your goals today while also maintaining the agility you need to quickly scale with your business in the future? Do they offer a complete and integrated spend management solution that can be connected to a wealth of third-party apps and systems that allow you to customize processes in a way that fits your exact business?

Once complete, we¡¯ll score your level of business agility based on the answers you provide. Whether you get the highest score indicating fully automated and integrated spend management; are still getting there with some but not all of your spend management covered; or are really starting from square one ¨C we¡¯ll offer advice on types of improvements you should consider and some insight into the benefits you can expect to see as you continue to expand your spend management landscape and control.

Finally, regardless of your results, we¡¯ll give you access to our spend management toolkit, offering an array of information from best practices to planning templates to thought leadership papers and more. Plus, if you¡¯re already using SAP »ÆÉ«¶ÌÊÓƵ solutions, we¡¯ll give you a complete overview of our partner apps to help extend the value of your existing spend management technology.

So, what are you waiting for?

Take the Business Agility Assessment today.

It may end up being one of the best three-minute business investment you ever make.