Orpheus: a flying start - The acquisition of Orpheus—a Germany-based analytics software company—in 2020, brought McKinsey 15 years of experience in the procurement analytics field. Over those years, the Orpheus team had developed an impressive capability in granular spend transparency and reporting, serving companies that matched McKinsey’s growth ambitions. The deal brought together Orpheus’ experience, cutting-edge technology, with McKinsey’s deep industry expertise, setting the stage for exciting advancements in the procurement field and offering clients the best of all worlds.
News overview
Spendscape celebrates its 5th anniversary: A journey from transparency and insights to impact
Five years ago, McKinsey stepped into the software solution for spend analytics arena, with the acquisition of Orpheus founded in 2005. The intervening period has seen Orpheus evolve into Spendscape, delivering on its primary mission to empower procurement and business leaders to make better informed decisions on external spend. How did we get here?
Transparency. Insights. Impact.
Fast forward five years, and Spendscape – renamed from Orpheus in 2023 – has curated category and supplier analytics, intelligent price volatility management or risk mitigation modules, and has expanded into Scope-3 emissions transparency and reporting and other sustainability dimensions, in line with the increased responsibilities of procurement functions today.
Spendscape’s success is based on its ever-increasing capability to create a true single source of truth and improved data quality for its clients. By delving into extensive procurement data, the platform helps users make fact-based procurement decisions and unearth savings opportunities. Integrating opportunity management and savings tracking (Wave by McKinsey) to helps to close the loop from insights to impact.
Stronger together
The Spendscape ethos is to leverage the best systems and expertise available. So, while building the platform architecture on the latest technologies, we are also leveraging McKinsey’s alliance and partnership ecosystem, which has built strong partnerships with leading technology providers in recent years.
For example, SAP has recently highlighted our collaboration in adopting and pioneering the latest capabilities. Offering Spendscape on SAP BTP guarantees a seamless data flow and advanced analytics, delivering significant value and impactful outcomes for clients who want to leverage that architecture.
Spendscape users are also benefitting from our multiple data partnerships for market, risk, supplier diversity, and emission data, which we partly curate in house to provide the next level of combined efficacy and advantage. Our partnership with Celonis, a global provider of process mining technologies, is an example of where McKinsey is able to combine process analytics with strategic spend insights to provide a complete picture of Spendscape user’s procurement behavior and answer key questions such as: What impact do processing inaccuracies have on my strategic planning? What are the processing shortcomings behind actual results? Which levers can I pull to optimize my procurement process?
Leading the market
We’re proud to be recognized by Spend Matters' Spend Analytics SolutionMap for our leading capabilities, and to offer clients a solution that drives lasting impact, off-the-shelf modules, and the ability to co-create. What stands out to the Spend Matters analysts are our advanced analytics capabilities and AI-powered recommendations. These features empower procurement teams to make data-driven decisions, enhancing efficiency and driving cost savings.
As we look forward to the next five years of Spendscape, we are excited about our growing set of features, modules, and service offerings—from negotiation excellence to gen AI-powered cost savings initiatives. We’re pushing the boundaries to expand our procurement analytics capabilities, ensuring that our clients are equipped with the latest and greatest modules, analyses, and service offerings to drive adoption and scale.
If you are interested in our current Spendscape capabilities and our roadmap towards automated insights and platform innovation, please reach out to us.