DSM creates innovative products and services in life and materials sciences. DSM’s products are used globally in a wide range of markets and applications, supporting a healthier, more sustainable and enjoyable way of living. DSM is committed to continuously providing outstanding products and services for human and animal well-being.
With its worldwide reach and extensive manufacturing operations, DSM found itself with a real need to improve and more effectively manage the amount it was spending on direct and indirect items. Any gain in efficiency could deliver a significant return on investment — and improve profitability.
DSM was seeking a solution that could uncover and fix general data quality issues as well as help the company manage data specific to its industry and its operations. To support its manufacturing processes, DSM manages extensive product, inventory and item data. As a result, spend reporting and spend analysis were critical needs within the organization. However, DSM found that it had no enterprisewide system for spend categorization — and frequently not even spend categorization at the business unit level. DSM sought to assign expenditures to defined spend categories to enable spend reporting and analysis.
To better manage this process, DSM needed a solution that would allow for coding to eCl@ss, the international standard for the description and classification of products and services. All of this also had to be seamlessly integrated into DSM’s existing SAP SRM systems in real time through a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
“Worldwide, there were a thousand people raising purchase orders, and we were asking them to make consistent judgments about which of the 27,500 codes was applicable to every order,” said Joachim Beurskens, Global Data Manager Purchasing for DSM. The company saw that automating the assignment of classification codes would eliminate the inevitable errors which would come from assigning these codes manually. Ultimately, the company sought to use the improved data for more accurate direct and indirect spend analysis. To achieve these goals, DSM turned to DataFlux.
The company selected DataFlux to give DSM’s business users an intuitive interface to find problems and develop rules to fix these errors. Once these rules were complete, the DataFlux technology offered the ability to integrate these business rules seamlessly within DSM’s existing SAP systems.
For eCl@ss commodity coding, DataFlux offered an intelligent, automated matching system that could analyze DSM’s existing data and correctly assign eCl@ss codes based upon the available data. The patented DataFlux matching technology drove the eCl@ss classification, automating what would have otherwise been an extensive and time-consuming manual effort.
Furthermore, for easy ongoing maintenance, DataFlux was able to enable the matching list to be drawn from a continually updated industry standard eCl@ss list. As new items were added to the SAP system, the staff could quickly update these items with eCl@ss codes, continuing the process of organizing spend data over time.
DataFlux provided DSM with reliable and consistent data — and enriched that data with industry standard eCl@ss codes. The SOA-enabled approach from DataFlux allowed the data quality processes to be reused across systems and architectures. This enhanced data quality enabled DSM to adhere to its data governance strategy, leading to measurable results and more efficient achievement of business goals.
“Users enter the text for the item they want to buy, along with any items codes that they have, and a screen pops up saying: ‘Here are the top five recommended eCl@ss codes based on what you’ve typed’,” Beurskens explains, “It looks exactly like the normal purchase order process, but behind the scenes it is matching the text against hundreds of thousands of keywords in several languages, and generating eCl@ss codes.”
With DataFlux technology in place, DSM has been able to correctly assign eCl@ss codes — driving improved spend analysis.