SAS^® Sourcing Data Quality

For procurement organizations, the need to reduce commodity costs without increasing risk is becoming more pronounced. And since companies are beginning to rely more on their own resources and less on partnerships to resolve procurement implementation issues, the need for a comprehensive procurement solution is increasing as well. Still, several important limitations prevent most companies from effectively accomplishing this goal.

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First, many companies don't have a reliable way to enhance procurement data quality and classify commodities, often meaning that suppliers are not uniquely identified.

Second, the accuracy of purchase reports is often questionable. When items are not named and numbered consistently across the enterprise and duplicate supplier names remain in the database, the process of reducing the number of suppliers and overall supplier spend becomes more challenging and unreliable.

Third, much supplier information does not contain the necessary detail to ensure accurate analysis, and most procurement systems don't allow companies to incorporate third-party data. Finally, procurement data often isn't comprehensive enough to provide a complete view of data at the commodity or vendor level.

All these factors create a treacherous environment for purchasing executives to control commodity costs reliably.

Comprehensive classification, rationalization and normalization
SAS Sourcing Data Quality enhances the quality of your data and provides accurate, detailed and comprehensive information to help you reduce commodity spend without increasing risk. SAS uses automated coding based on industry standards and can readily accept any classification system. You can also leverage third-party information for supplier enrichment and ensure your suppliers are accurately and consistently named through supplier normalization.

Employing automated classification and normalization to reduce manual effort, along with a methodology that includes a review of classified and normalized data, SAS Sourcing Data Quality helps you ensure adequate supply while reducing commodity costs.

SAS Sourcing Data Quality provides:

• Improved item master quality.
• Automated commodity classification, a service normally offered only by consulting firms.
• Cleansing and normalizing of procurement data to enhance sourcing strategies.
• Supplier normalization and enrichment.
• A scalable design built for complex global environments with large volumes of data.
• Prebuilt best practices in UNSPSC and eCl@ss coding, data cleansing and data quality procedures.
• Support for direct and indirect procurement.
• Business rules for data handling that are incorporated once and then used repeatedly.

As a result, procurement executives can:

• Be confident that they are paying the right price for commodities.
• Ensure that quality and supply levels meet defined standards.
• Understand true commodity volumes and supplier volumes, leading to more profitable negotiations.
• Accurately identify trends as a baseline for procurement forecasts.

SAS Sourcing Data Quality is a component of the SAS Supplier Relationship Management suite, a comprehensive, integrated set of data management and analytic applications that help procurement departments gain a better understanding of their purchases, suppliers and performance in order to make better strategic sourcing decisions.