This excellent quarterly report from Accenture summarizes the top market trends affecting major spend categories. Here are highlights from the report, taken from Accenture’s website. You can download the report here.
Q2 Spend Trends: The Big Five
- Logistics: Tightening European Markets Still Offer Savings Opportunity: European markets face similar issues as the U.S.—aging drivers, onerous regulation, and rising wages. But the right local market knowledge reveals opportunities to drive cost savings in Europe’s fragmented logistics markets.
- Risk Management: Securities Actions Keep Enterprise Risk Management on the CFO Front Burner: More clients are taking a fresh look at evaluating their Total Cost of Risk, and applying a more rigorous and structured review process to ensure they are minimizing risk exposure with best-in-class fees and rate structures.
- Travel: Evolving Regulations Serve as Reminder to Reexamine Corporate Card Agreements: Corporate credit cards represent a low-friction change opportunity that, if executed effectively, can yield significant savings. Proposed European Parliament regulations on card fees are a reminder to reexamine card agreements.
- Capital: Growing Construction Demand Puts Pressure on Input Prices: Increasing investment in manufacturing capacity and recovering public sector infrastructure funding are driving inflation in building materials like concrete, pushing buyers to evaluate long and short-term contracting strategies.
- Energy: Demand Management Techniques Grow in Importance: As more renewable energy sources come online, power producers are responding with more real-time pricing and demand response programs—creating new opportunities for buyers to link demand-side intelligence with buy-side procurement to drive savings.We hope you enjoy reading this quarter’s report and the insights it has to offer.
