The Vendors component provides deep cost analysis of vendor spend by vendor type, cost center, project, and IT tower.

Common source systems

Some common source systems for Vendor data are:

• Oracle/PeopleSoft
• SAP ERP

If you do not have a vendor management system or have difficulty gathering the data, you can also use your GL data to extract the vendors and their associated cost centers.

In addition, you may want to consider stack ranking the vendors in order of each vendor's spend and select the top 50 or 100 vendors to load into Apptio. For those vendors that fall out of the stack ranking, those costs will flow through the Other Cost Pool object.

Questions to consider

As you begin researching your Vendor data, here are some questions to consider:

• Are vendors associated to a single tower or do individuals work across multiple towers?
• If you have vendors split across multiple towers, are the costs to those vendors consistent over time?
• Do you want to report on all vendors or only the top 50 or 100 vendors?
• Can you categorize your vendors by type (such as strategic vs transactional)?
• Do you have contacts in mind for requesting the required data?
• Do you anticipate any struggles with acquiring the data?
• How clean is your data?

These are all questions your project and Success Management team will want to know as you look at extracting the data from your source system and loading it into Apptio.

The presentation below will explore in more detail the data elements used in the Vendor configuration of the Apptio Cost Transparency Foundation implementation.  It will take a look at how your data will be reflected in the application reporting, and make recommendations on some data configuration best practices.

Required columns

The table below lists the data sets and specific data elements from those data sets that are required. There are many other data elements you may wish to include. Please refer to your Configuration Workbook for more details on all data elements.

Vendor Identifier

For Vendor identifier, the following data elements combined together define the level of uniqueness:

• Vendor Name
• Vendor ID
• Vendor Type
• Vendor Function
• Vendor Service

In addition, you can add an additional column to add another layer of granularity as needed using the Cost Source Key Metafield.

Columns Required To Link Data Sets

You will also need to consider the ways in which you'll link the Cost Source Master Data set to other Master Data sets. The table below highlights some specific data elements needed for linking data sets together.

If you do not have sufficient data for allocating between Cost Source and Vendors, you may use assumptive allocations. For Cost Source to Vendors, this means you should allocate costs based on Vendor Name/ID only.