Unlocking Hidden Value
Emptoris Data Management services are focused on helping you unlock the value in your spend and contract data. This service is designed to address all types of spend—indirect, MRO, direct—and aggregate data from all types of enterprise systems to provide you with accurate and granular visibility across 100% of your spend. Our data analysts leverage Emptoris tools that automate data enrichment and employ multiple sophisticated enrichment approaches. This enables an automated, repeatable, and efficient spend data enrichment process that empowers you with more complete spend visibility to make better business decisions.
Client Business Objectives
- More accurate and granular spend classification
- Rapid, repeatable approach to maintaining better spend visibility
- Improved spend-to-contract compliance
How Emptoris Delivers
Alignment with the Business
We know that every business is different and start by reviewing the key drives and objectives of your spend analysis and compliance related initiatives. From there, we assess existing sources of data and review the strengths and weaknesses of your existing analysis approaches to understand the existing gaps in your spend visibility. Armed with this information, we tailor the enrichment and analysis approach for your business.
Expert Data Analysts
Our data analysts live and breathe spend and contract data. They have experience across a wide range of industries and are skilled at making sure the enriched spend data will deliver the insight you need to run your business. Accurate and granular category classification is a core requirement of every customer, whether it's to a proprietary structure, a standard one like UNSPSC, or both. Based on the needs of the business, our analysts typically structure the enrichment to include 20 or more dimensions, such as supplier approval status, supplier diversity status, geography, over-under payment, and more. Based on their experience with other companies, they provide creative approaches to delivering these and other dimensions for analysis.
Content and Tools
The Emptoris Spend Data Manager, which forms the backbone of this service, combines rules-based, machine-learning, and item-level enrichment to enable accurate and granular visibility. It leverages a vendor knowledge base of over 22 million vendor profiles globally and an item (or part) classification knowledge base of over 10 million items. And, it can incorporate item-level information (e.g., part attributes, descriptions) from external sources where none exists internally. The application of these tools and content enables a more rapid and accurate classification service.
Automated, Repeatable Process
Our data analysts follow an automated process to ensure efficient, repeatable spend data enrichment. The first step is to aggregate, cleanse, and normalize the spend data. Second, based on the business requirements they leverage the Emptoris tools and knowledge bases to enrich and classify the spend data. The third step comprises a review with your key stakeholders of the enriched data to make sure it meets your business requirements. We partner with your team to ensure that any knowledge specific to your business is transferred to our analysts and ultimately into the rules and knowledge bases used to classify your spend data. The final step is to make the enriched spend data available to your broader team, who can begin using it to drive business decisions, develop sourcing strategies, and identify new opportunities for savings. During the course of their use of the data, there is a closed-loop feedback mechanism through which they quickly and easily can recommend improvements to the classification to drive even greater accuracy.
Service Offering |
Description |
| Spend Analysis Program Design |
The first step to a successful spend analysis program, this service focuses on pragmatic program design from a business perspective. It ensures that the spend analysis program will help you achieve your business objectives and deliver the insight you need to make better decisions. This service includes:
- Analysis of current "as-is" state, including inventory of available systems and data
- Collection and synthesis of use cases across the various business units
- Development of implementation roadmap, leveraging spend analysis best practices, to meet stated use cases and business needs
- Development of data gathering requirements and model to maximize the value for purchasing, sourcing and compliance initiatives
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Initial Spend Data Enrichment |
This one-time initial service lays the groundwork for efficient, repeatable enrichment of the spend data to achieve increasing accuracy and granularity over time. In this initial phase, our data analysts take an iterative approach, applying various enrichment approaches and knowledge bases to the spend data and, in partnership with the customer, evaluating the results to identify the best ongoing approach to achieve the accuracy and granularity needed to meet business objectives. This process includes:
- Transaction data aggregation, cleansing, and normalization
- Creation of dimensions necessary to meet customer business objectives
- Vendor data enrichment leveraging Emptoris vendor knowledge base
- Spend auto-categorization leveraging Emptoris item knowledge base
- Creation of classification rules
- Review of automated output and customer specific refinement
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| Spend Data Refreshes |
To enable tracking and monitoring of savings and other initiatives, periodic refreshes are conducted to incorporate enterprise spending since the initial data enrichment or previous refresh. This forms the basis of a repeatable process through which you can maintain current, accurate visibility. Refresh frequency varies by customer and is typically done on a quarterly, monthly, or even weekly basis. With each refresh, the data quality typically improves as the tools incorporate feedback and learning each time. The data refresh service includes:
- Application of existing aggregation, cleansing, and normalizations rules
- Incorporation of feedback into classification rules
- Review of automated output
- Updates to knowledge base and rules to classify any new types of spend
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Services Overview 
