This global division of a highly advanced technology company managed the corporation’s information competencies with an expansive global delivery capability. This company is a leading federal services and IT contractor with a strong heritage of delivering world-class solutions and delivering advanced technology across a broad spectrum of domains.
To support its wide-ranging operations, the company must manage extensive amounts of product data. The company had over a million existing, unique item records and an additional 10-20K new records were generated each month. A substantial portion of these records were for similar or identical items that were bought elsewhere in the company.
As a result, the company had a common data problem – duplicate data – but had no idea precisely what data was duplicated. This was not just a data management problem, however. Accurate spend analysis was extremely difficult because the duplicate items were hard to reconcile in reports.
The company saw a need for accurate, comprehensive commodity coding. A single code, when added to a record, could provide a universal identifier for the item, regardless of the originating application or source. The organization initially sent this data to a third party-vendor for manual coding. But with a per-record cost and an eight-week turnaround time, the company found this solution to be expensive and inefficient.
Seeking a more cost-effective and efficient commodity coding solution, the company turned to DataFlux.
DataFlux technology enabled business users at the company to easily assign UNSPSC commodity codes to item data. The DataFlux Accelerator for Commodity Coding gave the company a commodity coding process that was able to comprehensively and accurately categorize the company’s data.
With the intuitive DataFlux interface, business users can drive the commodity coding process. The software looks at item descriptions and other details to find a probable match in the UNSPSC registry. A business analyst can check these matches and refine them over time. The technology saves the rules created by the business user, allowing the company to train the software to the needs of the business.
Taking commodity coding tasks in house represented an immediate and significant cost savings for the organization. The entire DataFlux implementation was brought in for about half of the cost of an average year’s worth of outsourced data processing. Furthermore, processed data was now available immediately, instead of after an eight-week delay.
Furthermore, the company found that the quality of the data processed through DataFlux was a significant improvement over what had been provided by the outsourcing vendor. The company found that a substantial portion of its data had previously been incorrectly coded – or single items had been coded to multiple UNSPSC descriptions. In one example, a single item had been coded under 121 unique UNSPSC classifications.
DataFlux allowed the company to correct these issues, resulting in consistent, accurate and reliable data for the company. With more accurate commodity codes, the company was able to perform more accurate spend analysis and consequently reduce costs.