Walnut Creek, CA October 9, 2002 Software provider Softface Inc. this week announced that Strategic Procurement Solutions, a company that offers supply management consulting and training services to the Fortune 1000, has joined the Softface Partner Program as a Procurement Intelligence Partner.
As part of the agreement, Strategic Procurement Solutions will implement the Softface Procurement Intelligence Suite, an automated and repeatable data enhancement and analysis solution, into its consulting practice.
According to Softface, in Fortune 1000 companies the sources of spend data are typically internal enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing, and inventory systems and external information providers, such as procurement card providers and other supplier data, few of which deliver the data in a meaningful format for normalized spending analysis.
The typical commodity and supplier information quality ranges from cryptic, free form text, to indecipherable groupings of abbreviations and generic commodity codes. Unlike the manually-intensive approach to data analysis, which involves manually re-writing procurement history information at a rate of 30 to 40 entries per hour into a desktop spreadsheet, Softface said its core technology generates spending information from multiple data sources at a rate of tens of thousands of entries per hour.
"While spending analysis has always served as the crucial first step in any supply chain initiative, it has traditionally been an arduous and expensive process. In this economy, spend analysis has been elevated from a 'nice to have' to a 'must have' corporate initiative, because it uncovers potential cost savings," stated Mark Trowbridge, general partner at Strategic Procurement Solutions. "Softface provides an automation tool to uncover those savings opportunities, along with the detailed commodity information required to achieve the savings."
Fran Carlo, director of strategic partnerships for Softface, added, "Strategic Procurement Solutions has always given their customers hard dollar results quickly. By implementing the Softface solution, Strategic Procurement Solutions will have the ability to capture additional cost savings for their customers on a repeatable basis."
