SANTA CLARA, CA May 14, 2002 In an economic environment where companies are leaving no stone unturned to reduce costs, more and more companies are discovering that streamlining their purchasing spend through e-sourcing is one of the best ways to deliver bottom line benefits. However, the road to achieving maximum e-sourcing efficiency is not necessarily smooth.
Effective spend analysis, for example, is one of the most important components of a successful strategic sourcing initiative. Yet such analysis is typically plagued by problems like fragmented data from multiple enterprise systems and slow, expensive spend classification methods that are difficult to scale up and repeat. If a company spends months consolidating spend data from disparate systems across the enterprise, it can lose out on millions of dollars in potential savings before it can even start implementing its decisions.
Zycus, a provider of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven content management solutions, is working to help companies avoid this problem and maximize their returns from strategic sourcing by accelerating the savings discovery process. Its AI-based automated spend analysis solutions ensure that companies can get detailed insight into their enterprise spend landscape in a matter of weeks, and thus take superior sourcing decisions and realize bottom line benefits much faster on a repeatable basis.
Central to Zycus spend analysis solutions is the built-in support for UNSPSC (United Nations Standard Products and Services Code), a worldwide classification/coding system developed in 1998 by the United Nations and Dun & Bradstreet.
Zycus CEO, Aatish Dedhia, says UNSPSC has inherent advantages over existing taxonomies such as the SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) code that make it a better framework for product/service categorization. UNSPSC is not only the first truly hierarchical classification standard, but also is much more detailed than other schemas, he noted. It allows commodities and products to be properly and uniquely classified, so that companies can track purchasing patterns more efficiently. Plus its hierarchical structure enables upward roll-up and downward drilling, which is integral for tactical spend analysis which lead to strategic decision making.
