Climate Change drives Carbon Tracking

This article appears in our Q2 2022 issue of Finance Transformation Magazine. To download the issue, click here

Max Kent, VP of Global Procurement and ESG at Compleat, explains how Compleat are helping Clients Face the challenges brought on by Climate Change and address their Carbon Reporting requirements.

Digital Procurement, the area I’ve been leading at Compleat Software for the past four years, is becoming an increasingly important aspect of financial software transformation for businesses.

When we think Business to Business (B2B) rather than Business to Consumer (B2C) it is easy to forget that the way we order things in our personal lives, and in our business lives, is becoming increasingly closer.

Often, staff order items for their organisations using their own personal accounts, bypassing agreed purchasing processes, as they feel it is faster, cheaper, and easier. However, technology has advanced for businesses.

We have taken these advancements, indeed even created them, and distilled it down into the technology solution we offer at Compleat Software.

Now you have access to incredibly powerful software tools. Aimed at creating a smooth, simple yet feature rich and professional cloud-based interface with which to run the entire Procurement, Ordering, Cost Management and Accounts Payable functions.

Let’s look at some of the new technology we are launching this year, and this is where it gets exciting:

Integrated Online Buying

This feature allows you to integrate with ANY online supplier website that you wish your business to buy from, into Compleat’s purchasing controls. All your staff do is login and select the supplier they need. The software will then launch the website of that supplier, without laborious punch-out tools or catalogues.

This is important, as it means that:

• From an end user perspective , it is simple and easy to use – they may well be buying from a similar supplier than that which they use in their personal lives.
• From a business perspective , it creates a ‘controlled choice’, giving access to all necessary products and services to any staff that need to order them, in a way that can be recorded, tracked, analysed, and managed.

This really is the future for businesses buying process, the point being that you can essentially build and control your own ‘shop window’ or ‘marketplace’ of preferred suppliers that you allow your staff to order from.

Even simpler is the latest Punch IN tool we developed with Amazon Business, where users of the two platforms no longer need to even log in to Compleat, they start their journey on Amazon, just like we would do at home!

The benefits of controlling expenditure are vast. In fact 8-12% of a business’ outgoings can be saved simply by controlling how its staff bought from the suppliers they are ALREADY using. For many businesses, just being able to now access the kind of software technology that can facilitate this will be a major step forward in their digital evolution.

Compleat Analytics

Integrated online buying and the use of approval and invoice capture software tools in iCompleat, provides us with a rich and accurate source of consistently fed data – from order to invoice and then into our cloud Datalake, allowing our end users to analyse, monitor and refine expenditure in a way like never before.

Business Intelligence reporting tools have been around for years, however the issue in this area has always been a split between the novice users with a bit of Excel knowledge and the solutions that the largest companies need, and had the budgets to invest in.

Over the past three years I’ve been heavily involved in developing the brand new Advanced Spend Analytics and Carbon Tracking software tools, which we launched globally in April this year.

Both tools address these problems as Compleat can now combine the rich and consistent source of header and line-item detail from purchase orders and invoices we receive, with pre-built, powerful enterprise grade cloud-based business intelligence and reporting tools.

Advanced Spend Analytics (ASA)

ASA is the culmination of three years’ worth of development work, customer feedback and fact finding to get to the stage where we have a fully cloud-based tool designed to give staff in Procurement or Finance the reporting and visibility, they need to view expenditure by Spend Category, Nominal Code, Site, User, Supplier, Date or Product.

Having thousands of lines of data in a constantly updating format gives the customer the information to drive down costs, merge suppliers of the same products and understand where the business has overpaid or could use an alternative.

We now have many of our customers using ASA and provide additional services around this to support how their Procurement teams get the best results from our tools and data.

Carbon Tracking

Carbon Tracking takes on the technology of ASA and uses the rich source of pre-existing supplier invoice data combined with updated supplier carbon intensity ratios, calculated by our C02 supply chain tracking data specialist using approved and widely recognised methods to provide reporting on the carbon emissions produced for every unit of expenditure.

The tool provides the ability to view Carbon Emissions by Scope 1-3 (Business Travel, Energy & Utilities and Procurement / Supply Chain respectively) and by site, supplier, expenditure category and by time, date and by volume of invoices and deliveries.

This means that having the ability to view and work with suppliers to reduce carbon emissions will have the biggest single impact on reduction of the businesses own C02 emissions and will lead to better performing supplier relationships.

There is a growing realisation that any business that doesn’t have a handle on this will be at a competitive disadvantage – and rightly so, given the context.

In Summary

The vision we collectively hold at Compleat is that by understanding the journey of an order, from requisition to payment and re-order is something that can be greatly enhanced by technology.

Harnessing the power of Digital Procurement and Spend Management technology and making it accessible and easy to use whilst keeping ultimate functionality means that we are now at an extremely exciting time in the evolution of digital transformation and I’m proud to be a part of it.

About the author: Max Kent

Max Kent is Vice President of Global Procurement & Business Development at Compleat Software. With 25 years’ experience in Commercial and Public Sector Procurement, alongside Global Sales within Supply Chain and Outsourced / Digital Procurement industries. Max has a long track record of building strong partnerships with both key clients and suppliers and taking new digital procurement products and services to market.