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Managing tail suppliers

In B2B procurement, long tail spend refers to the many small, one-time or routine purchases that a company makes from a variety of suppliers. While each individual purchase may not seem significant, the aggregate spend on long tail items can be substantial and make up a significant portion of a company’s overall procurement budget. Despite its significance, long tail spend is often overlooked or managed in a fragmented manner, leading to higher costs, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities for cost savings and improved supplier relationships.

Why is long tail spend important?

The time spent on tail suppliers often creates an imbalance in the work of the purchasing department and therefore procurement professionals relatively spend a lot of time when buying a variety of low-value products and/or services that are only purchased a few times per year or even just once. In many cases, there is little or no insights into the expenditure and purchasing behavior of internal buyers and these tail suppliers. When mapping out the costs, it is important to put the entire purchasing process under a magnifying glass. This not only provides insight into the direct purchasing costs, but also the indirect purchasing costs. Consequently, these costs vary from sourcing, expediting, vendor onboarding, and invoice handling to logistics operations.

By processing your tail spend in our intuitive Q-Card application, you bring overall spending under management by reaching an efficient supplier base with opportunities for both direct and indirect cost savings. The creation of vendor master data is no longer neccessary, just like high costs and time-consuming onboarding for those infrequent or one-time tail suppliers. Q-Card allows you to have more control over the behaviour of your internal buyers/ requestors throughout multiple departments with predefined and structured worksflows. Centralized and integrated reporting with your backbone and financial systems gives you full control and visibility over all your business expenses. Allowing corporate buyers to purchase products and services with pre-approved budgets and pre-funded virtual cards will also allow you to reduce risks, optimize working capital and cash positions.