How Intelligent Spend Management Enables Efficiency

Tropic was founded on the belief that the most valuable solutions would be built on top of differentiated data assets. To execute this data-first approach properly, our team focused on three tenets that would bring our vision to fruition: collection, normalization, and distribution of our data.

Our initial procurement-as-a-service business was built to accomplish two things: 1) Solve the challenges buyers were having managing and reducing their software spend and 2) Gather data that would only be possible with a hands-on service out in the market. This service saved customers $266 million and allowed us to collect and normalize $10 billion worth of spend data.

But we weren’t done yet.

Traditional Spend Management

After developing an incredible data engine on the shoulders of our services foundation, we then built a best-in-class spend management platform over the last several years to serve buyers even better.

At its core, spend management software gives businesses visibility and control over their expenses. Hundreds of solutions in this category serve businesses ranging from mom and pop shops to Fortune 50s through with a vast array of capabilities, such as building dynamic approvals, managing invoices, and reporting on spend, to name a few.

Many of these legacy platforms are also taking slightly different approaches to manipulate the same data set, displaying customers’ data back for them in seamless, at times elegant ways.

Intelligent Spend Management

While traditional solutions tackle data manipulation differently, only Tropic is intelligent. It’s here that we’re ready to distribute our data to buyers by advancing spend management to a more intelligent approach.

What is Intelligent Spend Management?

Intelligent Spend Management is the modern evolution of traditional spend management, incorporating unbiased supplier data, market intelligence, and artificial intelligence-driven processes (AI) to optimize procurement and sourcing decisions.

How is Tropic Leading This Approach?

Tropic integrates unbiased market intelligence with a best-in-class spend management platform so finance and procurement leaders can maintain visibility, control, and leverage over all of their supplier spend. We take tried and true approaches to spend management, and supercharge them with the distinct intelligence only we can provide from our years of data collection and normalization.

Intelligent Spend Management gives companies maximum leverage to drive savings and efficiency at any stage by allowing them to:

• Compare their spend to similar businesses to see where they’re ahead or behind
• Leverage unbiased benchmarks to determine whether proposals are actually fair
• Strategically manage spend with proactive recommendations and actions tuned to business needs
• Automate spend management controls from intake to payment

Level the Playing Field and Increase Spend Efficiency

Technology buyers have had the chips stacked against them for far too long. Sellers are armed with a nearly limitless amount of data about their buyers, from intent signals, to relationship maps, and buyers have historically only been able to rely on personal experience and maybe expensive reports.

Tropic is here to change that by democratizing the benchmarks and insights from managing $10 billion in spend across 65,000 contracts.

In an AI-enabled environment, it’s no longer good enough for software to just deliver picks and shovels that enable processes to run more efficiently.

• Solutions need to solve actual problems by providing distinct data that can support strategic decision making
• Solutions need agents to take the mundane work off employees' plates, and replace it with high impact time spent on the most critical business problems

This is where Intelligent Spend Management comes in. Tropic is expanding upon our services foundation to take ownership around the challenges buyers face, such as lack of pricing transparency and operational inefficiency. We couldn’t be more excited to bring Intelligent Spend Management to the market and help buyers transition from understanding their spend to driving proactive action around greater efficiency.

Request a demo to see what Tropic is all about.