In the current business environment, successful strategic sourcing requires a blend of category, process, supply base and technology expertise, Zycus’ latest offering provides a platform for sourcing teams to bring these pieces together and achieve sustainable results.

In order to be more broadly adopted, sourcing tools need easier to use functionality for constructing requests, evaluating bids, and archiving the results of events in a searchable fashion. The inclusion of strategic sourcing plan development within a sourcing application has the potential to enable purchasing organizations to more cleanly execute to plan.

iPlan is the automation of the sourcing strategy including plan and development and was developed by Zycus to put strategic back into sourcing. iPlan provides a seven step sourcing process for plan creation. The product allows users to capture and analyze data to be used through built-in tools like commodity profiling, demand aggregation, supply market analysis and total cost modeling for effective sourcing plan development. Bringing all these areas together can be a daunting task for many companies and once you add in other knowledge based assets or the input from partners and consultants a streamlined work flow becomes very complex. Zycus iPlan provides a planning tool to leverage across these various sourcing aspects and make a difference in strategic sourcing.

Incoherence between spend data in the two disparate databases was restricting information flow across the supply chain processes. We needed an automated solution that would granularly classify the records, extract attribute information and help us identify the possible overlap between our internal system records and vendor catalogs by means of attribute detail comparison. Zycus' SDM not only provided us with a solution for cross referencing based on attribute information, but also helped us cut down on the duplicates.

By classifying all purchasing transactions at the source, AutoClass should provide significant benefits in terms of increased data integrity, and superior sourcing decisions brought about by increased spend visibility .

Zycus' work enabled us to identify savings opportunities we would not have been able to see without aggregating across UNSPSC and supplier. In some areas, it revealed significant spend from core suppliers, but not in the areas where we had negotiated deals with them. In other areas, it revealed spend leakage with non-preferred suppliers. Finally, in a number of areas it revealed much larger spend than we realized we had - across way too many suppliers. All these things helped us to build a supply management plan that is enabling us to leverage our spend in the right areas with the right suppliers.

By using AutoClass we are able to unlock information about our MRO spend which is already buried in our transaction systems. The information is of a depth and quality which our Supply Management group has not had available before. It will enable us to realize savings from avoiding unnecessary purchases and by concentrating spend with preferred suppliers.

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.

Because of the sheer volume and complexity of spend data within an enterprise, SDM must be enabled through use of business applications and services that automate labor-intensive classification, enhancement, and analysis activities and that can organize spend data at a detailed, attribute level — all on a repeatable basis.

Bearing Point has chosen to work with Zycus, amongst other tools, to allow us to be effective in meeting client specific demands. Each client situation and objective will be different and therefore it is important to us to be able to be flexible to meet different needs. Zycus has a tool which is very flexible and a committed staff to help meet various client needs. Their data consolidation and cleansing tool, which is also a learning tool, has strong functionality which is easily adaptable to clients varying levels of data availability. That is absolutely critical to a successful Spend Analysis Initiative.

With increased adoption of GSA Advantage!, the Federal Government will potentially save millions of dollars from purchase transactions in products and services. The Zycus SDM software integrated with the GSA Advantage! system, will automatically help categorize more than five million product and services data within the system to UNSPSC standards, and help people find what they need more easily.

I can now state that GE selected Zycus, Inc. for UNSPSC automated classification. Zycus competed in a field populated with such names as Mercado and SoftFace. Zycus won by a mile. GE chose Zycus because of its ability to rapidly (> 60,000 transaction records or SKUs/hr) and accurately (> 80%) classify free text purchase orders. Zycus is indeed "best in class" for UNSPSC classification.