Dun & Bradstreet Corp and SAS Institute Inc said yesterday they will offer a joint-approach to procurement tracking which could cut customers’ purchasing costs by as much as 15%. The cooperative proposition will involve bundling SAS’ data warehouse and Procurement Vision products, with consultancy, information and artificial intelligence (AI) services from D&B.
According to Larry Barth, D&B’s VP of supplier evaluation and management services, the procurement management efforts of most companies are currently frustrated by the multiplicity of purchasing systems – a situation that makes it almost impossible to accurately match suppliers with the goods or services they provide. The data’s not standardized, Barth says, we’ve seen some companies with up to 900 different identification codes for one supplier. He added: So how can a business put tactics, strategies and goals in place when it doesn’t even know who it’s dealing with?
D&B and SAS’ joint solution to this problem is a three stage process which starts by employing consultants to load all a company’s disparate procurement data, from enterprise resource planning, legacy and proprietary systems into SAS’ data warehouse. Data rationalization is then conducted by D&B consultants using AI matching routines to combine all the disparate data and come up with one identification code per supplier. The data on individual suppliers is then supplemented, for a fee, with any additional relevant information from D&B’s numbers database, which contains data on 50 million US and European businesses. The last stage uses SAS Institute’s latest decision support tool suite, Procurement Vision, to enable users to analyze their procurement data.
Now the procurement person can ask such questions as ‘how much money do I spend with IBM? Or how many hardware suppliers do I have?’ said Christine Kelly, SAS Institute’s global program manager for procurement. Kelly said the main difference between this solution and others available on the market is that it enables a company to take a enterprise-wide view of its procurement processes, as opposed to just looking at one system.
The procurement analysis service is available now, priced according to customer requirements. A typical implementation, said Kelly, might cost around $1m, of which 50% would account for overall service and consultancy costs, with 25% each going on D&B and SAS Institute data rationalization and procurement software costs.
Procurement system software, previously the province of old school electronic data interchange firms such as Harbinger Corp and Sterling Commerce Inc, is shifting ground under the influence of the internet, e-commerce, and the new generation of front-office customer relationship management software tools. Oracle Corp and start-up Ariba Technologies Inc are among the earliest companies to launch new generation, internet-enabled products.
