Santa Clara, CA October 2, 2002 Zycus, a provider of automated spend analysis and product content management solutions, this week announced that P&O, the international logistics and transport company, has selected Zycus for detailed classification of its procurement data into UNSPSC, the global product and services classification standard. Zycus said its automated UNSPSC classification and content enrichment solutions will enable P&O to get accurate top-down as well as bottom-up views of its spend landscape.
Currently deployed at P&O Ferries in the UK, which makes annual purchases of about GBP 600 million on wide range of products and services, Zycus' UNSPSC classification solution is meant to leverage purchasing efficiencies across the enterprise.
UNSPSC (United Nations Standard Products and Services Code), a worldwide classification system developed in 1998 by the United Nations and Dun & Bradstreet, is an open, global electronic commerce standard that provides a logical framework for classifying goods and services. The hierarchical structure of UNSPSC allows drilling down and rolling up, which is integral to tactical and strategic spend analysis. It is a global standard and freely available to the public with no copyright protection issues, which has led to its widespread adoption all around the world.
Zycus' AutoClass, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based automated UNSPSC classifier, working at more than 50,000 transaction records or stock keeping units (SKUs) per hour per machine and replacing manual coding, will power P&O's spend classification initiative. The provider said its built-in UNSPSC libraries and embedded domain intelligence minimize ramp-up time, and a mapping schema helps map proprietary schemas with UNSPSC. AutoClass also has built-in support for languages like French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese.
According to Nick Holness, head of fuel procurement, P&O, "After a lengthy process of evaluation, Zycus was able to meet our requirements for product coding both in terms of performance criteria and cost effectiveness."
