While it's not exactly new news -- milk good PR for all it's worth, I say -- Zycus' spend visibility deal with Orkla is fascinating given the multi-lingual, multi-currency environment that its applications are supporting. According to Supply and Demand Chain Executive, the Norwegian company is "deploying Zycus' spend data management solution to gain view of all purchases made by individual units across geographies, languages, and currencies across its operations in 13 countries ... [The solution] is classifying enterprise-wide data for both direct and indirect spend originating from around 40 diverse purchase order (PO), materials management and accounts payable (A/P) systems in 13 languages, including Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, German, Latvian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian and Romanian."

Increasingly, even smaller organizations engaged in global sourcing and trade must begin to think about the deployment Spend Management solutions that are global in vision and execution from the start. While visibility across disparate systems and environments is key -- and all spend visibility solutions worth their salt enable visibility in complex, heterogeneous systems environments -- global language and currency support from an information access and analytics perspective is increasingly critical as well. As more procurement and operations teams begin to invest in analyzing and understanding both global risk exposure and savings opportunities, I reckon that these types of deployments will become even more ubiquitous. For now, Orkla might be a global spend visibility pioneer. But I’m guessing that they'll be joined by hundreds more in their ambitious deployment model in the coming years.

- Jason Busch