Procurement Spend Analysis: Supplier, Category & Region Using SQL

Business Context

VectorBridge Manufacturing is a mid-sized industrial components manufacturer operating across four US regions — Northeast, Midwest, South, and West — with production facilities and procurement offices in each. The company manages relationships with 40 active suppliers spanning five spend categories: Raw Materials, Packaging, MRO (Maintenance, Repair & Operations), Logistics, and IT Services. Over fiscal year 2024, VectorBridge processed approximately 15,000 purchase invoices totalling an estimated $48 million in procurement spend. Despite the scale, the CPO (Chief Procurement Officer) has no consolidated view of where the money is actually going. Spend data lives in regional ERP instances and has never been rolled up into a single cross-dimensional report. This lack of visibility has led to missed volume consolidation opportunities — the company suspects it is paying premium prices with several suppliers simply because regional teams are negotiating independently rather than leveraging combined spend.

The SQL Challenge

The CPO needs a procurement spend report that answers three questions simultaneously: Which suppliers are receiving the most spend? Which categories are driving the highest costs? And which regions are the biggest spenders? The query will require multi-level GROUP BY aggregations to compute spend totals across supplier × category × region combinations, as well as the RANK() window function to rank suppliers by total spend both globally (across the whole company) and within each region — surfacing which supplier is the #1 spend recipient per region. A JOIN between the invoices table and the suppliers master table brings in the supplier name, category, and region dimensions needed for the final report.

Your Role and Deliverable

You are the data analyst supporting the CPO at VectorBridge Manufacturing. Your task is to produce two outputs from a single connected query: first, a supplier spend summary showing each supplier's total invoice spend, their global spend rank, and their rank within their region.