Building a Procurement Data Lake

I’m excited to unveil a project that’s taken my procurement analytics game to the next level: architecting a cloud-native Procurement Data Lake from the ground up. A procurement data lake is a storehouse for suppliers raw data. Typically procurement data are scattered over so many sources such as internal suppliers master list, ERP systems output, Purchase-to-Pay systems, supplier relationship management spreadsheets, and external feeds of supplier information such as EcoVadis, and a myriad of specialized suppliers portals that provides specific services (such as risk management, compliance, ESG data, etc. ). Some of these information are in excel spreadsheets or SQL databases, emails, internal and external dashboards, data feeds(structured and non-structured).

A truly digital procurement analytics program of the 21st century requires a clean, accessible single source of truth for all supplier information- the data foundation. However, to truly do procurement analytics you need to build a centralized procurement data lake (PDL) that capture all supplier information under one source. Building an effective data lake takes careful planning to ensure the following capabilities:

• Accommodate structured and unstructured data

• Enable real-time or near-real-time data updating and access

• Handle the expanding requirements of data complexity, size, and speed.

• Automate, extract, transform and load processes.

• Allow for external data integrations

• Be able to retrieve and manipulate data without technical details

To build an effective procurement data lake, procurement professionals needs to clearly identify the important and relevant data, how it should be transformed, and the necessary frequency of data updates and accuracy. Procurement subject matter expert knowledge is needed in order to categorize suppliers properly, build and maintain the data governance around the PDL.

With clean data and advanced analytics (such as data mining, predictive modeling, simulation, and optimization), we can help you generate meaningful procurement insights that helps you cut costs faster, easier, and better.

Sid Elbaz, is proclaimed Procurement Data Scientist with skill set that integrates digital data management with procurement, supply chain, and category management subject matter expert. If you have any need for help related to enabling a truly digital procurement platform please don't hesitate to contact me sid@elbazconsultancy.com