Spend Data Management

Emptoris Data Management services are focused on helping organizations unlock the value in contract and spend data. The service addresses all types of spend (e.g., direct and indirect)—and aggregates data from all types of enterprise systems—to provide timely, accurate and granular visibility across 100% of a company’s spend.

Emptoris Data Management leverages Emptoris Spend Analysis capabilities that automate data enrichment—and employs multiple sophisticated enrichment approaches. Emptoris Data Management Services enable:

• More accurate and granular spend classification
• Rapid, repeatable approach to maintaining better spend visibility
• Improved spend-to-contract compliance
• Easier identification of sourcing opportunities

Emptoris Data Management Services deliver:

• Alignment with the Business – Emptoris tailors the data enrichment and analysis process based on the unique business needs and objectives of each customer. We assess existing sources of data and review the strengths and weaknesses of existing analysis approaches to understand how best to deliver comprehensive spend visibility.
• Expert Data Analysts – Emptoris data analysts have deep experience across a range of industries and are skilled at ensuring that your enriched spend data will deliver the insight needed to run your business.
• Custom Enrichment and Dimensions – Emptoris Data Management delivers accurate and granular category classification whether it's to a proprietary structure or a standard one like UNSPSC. Emptoris will structure the enrichment as required and typically include 12 or more dimensions such as supplier approval status, supplier diversity status, geography, etc.
• Spend Data Manager – The Emptoris Spend Data Manager, which forms the backbone of the service, combines rules-based, intelligent and item-based enrichment to enable accurate and granular spend visibility. It leverages a vendor knowledge base of over 22 million vendor profiles globally and an item classification knowledge base of over 10 million items. The application of the Spend Data Manager enables a rapid and accurate classification service.
• Automated and Detailed Enrichment Processes – Emptoris 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, is to leverage the Emptoris Spend Data Manager and knowledge bases to enrich and classify the spend data. Third, is a spend review with your key stakeholders to make sure the spend data meets your business requirements. The final step is to make the 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.

Service Offerings

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

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 and external content (e.g., Equifax, D&B)
• Spend auto-categorization leveraging Emptoris item knowledge base
• Creation of classification rules
• Review of automated output and customer specific refinement

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