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Philips electronics does a lot more than produce those excellent commercials with the tagline Got to admit it's getting better. (Although they truly deserve extra credit for that ad campaign. Rare indeed is the commercial that I will laud for its catchiness.) The Amsterdam-based company has some 219,000 employees in more than 60 countries, and manufactures everything from batteries to semiconductors to flat screen televisions. Now factor in the number of supplies and suppliers needed to keep all those employees producing all those products, and you approach Manhattan Project complexity.

Beginning in 1999, the company became interested in managing that convoluted supply chain with modern e-procurement tools. The task of management was particularly burdensome when it came to indirect materials. Gaspar Mondejar, procurement manager at Philips, says the company wasn't able to track its indirect spend. Not only was that frustrating from a numbers standpoint, but it also meant that the company was missing opportunities to drive out costs. Mondejar says, We didn't have enough information to make good, leveraged contracts with suppliers. And we saw that with a central-based tool or system like Ariba, we could get that information much more easily.

Mondejar heads the unit responsible for implementing Philips' Ariba program, which the company calls AUSOM, for Ariba User Services and Operations Management. Unfortunately, his team's experience with getting everything running on the Ariba program was somewhat less than awesome. The problem wasn't with Ariba's software, but in the transferring of paper catalog content into electronic format. European e-procurement lags behind American abilities, and that point was driven home when Philips' suppliers began having trouble switching to electronic catalogs.  Mondejar says, Our suppliers were used to the famous paper catalog, but when we asked for electronic catalogs, we suffered a lot to get good quality and to get it on time, with the right description, with no errors in units of measure or price.

There was also the problem of the sheer scale of getting those catalogs online. At the writing of this article, Philips had about five to 10 percent of their indirect spend in their electronic catalogs, and even that small percentage meant there were 400,000 items in the catalogs.

But the real problem of all this catalog content was ensuring that the data was reliable. It's hard enough to take your own company's products online, but expecting literally thousands of suppliers to be able to populate online catalogs with clean, accurate data is not realistic. Philips needed a way to scrub all that catalog content.

That's where San Mateo-based Poet Software company came in. Michael Hogan, vice president of strategy and business development at Poet, explains that his company ensures procurement programs are working with clean, valid catalogs that are priced according to contract, and it also allows companies to measure and report on the information in those catalogs. Hogan summarizes the approach by using a saying that dates to the early days of computing: Procurement systems suffer from the garbage in, garbage out problem. So we make sure you're not taking in garbage."

Hogan's company set to work on keeping Philips' Ariba installation garbage-free. Poet's eSupplierPort is designed to allow buyers to confirm that catalog content is clean, properly structured and appropriately priced. Hogan summarizes it this way: Essentially, we ensure that what goes in is workable information.