Huge marketplace for government buyers gains visibility into commodity spending with a UNSPSC engine from Zycus
Zycus, a provider of software that analyzes spending patterns within the enterprise, has announced a win with the General Services Administration (GSA) Federal Supply Service (FSS).
It's another indication that GSA is serious about its e-business strategy, particularly as it pertains to the Advantage marketplace. The combination of spend management and procurement or supply chain portals is a natural, though few combinations of the technology have been seen so far.
The GSA marketplace handles hundreds of millions of dollars in total spending volume, and has ramped up to tens of thousands of users since debuting in 1996. With those kinds of volume, it's a particular challenge keeping track of metrics like category spending.
Zycus provides an engine that conforms to UNSPSC, a global standard for classifying products and services. UNSPSC, the brainchild of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and D&B (Dun & Bradstreet), is an identifier for commodity classes, not a granular code like EPC.
The point of tagging spending with UNSPSC is to more readily discern buying patterns (by units and departments, for example). As such, the GSA's goal with the Zycus engine is to gain more visibility into its spending and to be able to drill down into categories and perform analysis as needed.
GSA's use of this approach is progressive given how few companies are using spend analysis currently. |
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