I attended Spend Management Day in Palo Alto yesterday in order to hear the presentations by several people leading top notch spend management efforts in their organizations. I’ll have plenty to report on it in the next week or so, but would like to tee things off with a recap of my favorite take away from Ramsay Chu’s talk.

Ramsay is the VP of Strategic Sourcing at Fiserv and told of how modernizing their spend visibility program - or in his words, “moving off the BASS (Big Ass Spread Sheet) model” - increased his department’s credibility and influence.

Under Chu’s leadership, Fiserv went from an Inbox crashing spreadsheet to a central system that enriched about 1/2 a billion line items from 95 subsidiaries every quarter. Doing so enabled the team to package data, run reports and dive deeper into questions from the executives. This newfound spend visibility “wowed people” at Fiserv and quickly did wonders for the procurement team’s credibility and influence, thus shifting their role from acting on directives from management to actually having a say in the strategic direction and spend management efforts of Fiserv. As Ramsay humorously pointed out, now when he and his team are trapped on an elevator with an exec, they have “sound bites and bullet points to get people’s attention” rather than making small talk about the weather.

The lesson here is that quick, accurate access to spend data is a big hit with company decision makers. In the current economy, executives are hungry for data that can drive cost savings. Give them what they’re looking for and you’re credibility, influence and career prospects will rise.

Justin Fogarty is Managing Editor of Supply Excellence. For any questions or feedback on the blog or its contributors, Justin can be reached at jfogarty[at]ariba.com.