We guarantee 100% Spend Control. This is the bold statement that is repeated everywhere in AirFaas material. And sometimes we get asked, “what the hell does that even mean?”. That is a fair question, and luckily it is easy for us to answer!

Just to be clear, when we talk about spend, we talk about direct spend. With our customers, direct spend constitutes a major cash flow and indirect spend doesn’t play a major role for them. Spend Control in our view consists of 3 core elements:

1. Controlling the processes that lead to spending money and making decisions about how and with who the money is spent.
2. Having visibility into how much money is spent, with whom, and why.
3. Being able to audit the spending decisions long after they have been made.

Being able to define, monitor, and adjust the processes is crucial for having control over your spend. Without an established best practice it is very difficult to have a uniform way of working, documenting, comparing, and making decisions. In the worst-case scenario, all buyers work in their unique highly personal way. They make decisions based on their own criteria, leading into a situation where the results of the work are all over the place both literally and figuratively speaking. Sometimes, when a buyer is highly experienced this can be a good thing. But overall having a standardized process supports both strategic and operative purchasing.

Spend visibility is the only way to really understand outgoing cash flow in a meaningful way. It also allows you to analyze and understand the performance that you are getting for each euro spent. With proper spend visibility connected to category management capabilities, you can continuously evaluate how your spend changes. This means you can understand what the root causes are behind those changes, act on anomalies, and detected trends before issues become problems.

The ability to audit is an important element for creating a culture of accountability in your procurement organization. It will greatly reduce the amount of time in finding root causes for various purchasing-related problems and set a standard that nothing can be swept under the rug.

Individually, all of these are great vehicles for driving better buying and better control over your spend. But together, they are a truly powerful combination for understanding what is going on in your organization and driving cost-efficient, compliant behavior. When your organization can do the right things, document them in a way that information can be accessed later, and you have full visibility into everything procurement-related, you have reached 100% spend control.

How can AirFaas guarantee 100% spend control?

1. AirFaas tools allow you to establish a common process for procurement. Using the system not only eliminates manual work but creates a technical framework for established manageable procurement process.
2. With all procurement transactions being made in AirFaas or flowing through AirFaas via integrations, we can provide a 100% real-time visibility into spend and other key procurement and delivery capability performance indicators for 360-degree visibility.
3. AirFaas is built in a way that all business documents are linked to each other, and it is extremely easy to audit chains of transactions. Therefore, every process completed in AirFaas can be also audited later. Whether reviewing which drawing was submitted to the supplier, when and by whom, finding the results of a RFQ and understanding why a specific supplier was selected over another, or exploring the links between certain suppliers and poor performance in delivery or quality, the trail can be followed with a few clicks.

Because of the capabilities we provide to all AirFaas users we are not shy in guaranteeing 100% spend control. Because that is what AirFaas was built for.