Purchasing and Negotiation Training

Robert Menard, Certified Purchasing Professional, Certified Professional Purchasing Consultant, Certified Green Purchasing Professional

Look for release in the early spring of Spend Analytics Using Excel, a course developed by professional buyers for professional buyers.If you are among the vast majority of purchasing pros, your enterprise wide software is notoriously weak in spend analytics and reporting capability. Unless you enjoy the horsepower of the giants in the enterprise software industry, or have one of the “Cadillac” purchasing software products, you are, like most of the rest of us, at the mercy of the enterprise software product. Well, we resourceful purchasing pros are never without alternatives. While we cannot solve the software problem, we can solve the spend analytics and reporting by resort to an Excel spreadsheet.

Help is on the way in the form of a new online training course called Spend Analytics and Excel. This course is being developed jointly with the American Purchasing Society. It will not delve deeply into mathematics but will demonstrate in step by step fashion, including short tutorials for those “Excel averse” types, the purchasing analytics that will optimize your effectiveness.

We will show how to use Excel to analyze supplier responses to RFQs, to evaluate supplier performance, to project demand forecasting and replenishment models, even to analyze supplier financial health. You’ll learn shortcuts on sorting, presenting, and analyzing data so you can make sound decisions based upon user friendly dollars and numbers that you have created out of raw data.

Click Spend Analytics Using Excel for a one minute video about the course. Below is the text of the spoken greeting.

Most of us use Excel for spend analytics but how to get the most out of it is a mystery – not any more. This online course will demonstrate in step by step fashion, including short tutorials for those “Excel averse” types, the purchasing analytics that will optimize your purchasing effectiveness. You will learn how to use Excel to analyze supplier bids, evaluate supplier performance, create pivot tables and charts, and refined visuals. The course demonstrates how to use statistical techniques to spot waste, eliminate duplication, and harvest cost savings. You’ll learn shortcuts on sorting, presenting, and analyzing data so you can make sound decisions based upon user friendly dollars and numbers that you have created out of raw data.