SAVING PURCHASING DOLLARS BY UNIFYING
WAREHOUSE AND DECISION SUPPORT DATA
SAS Institute Inc., a market leader in integrated data warehousing and decision support, and Dun & Bradstreet, a leading provider of business-to-business information, has announced an enterprise procurement solution to support the strategic needs of procurement professionals worldwide.
The D&B and SAS enterprise procurement solution performs a number of critical functions for procurement professionals. The solution consolidates transaction-level purchasing data, providing snapshots of the enterprise's total procurement spend and transforms complex legacy data stored in back-office procurement systems into information that provides a clear and immediate strategic advantage. It provides fact-based insights to support future contract negotiations, leverage volume pricing and identifies critical vendor relationships in need of special attention and combines information warehousing, data mining, and OLAP/decision support to create a full function business application using D&B business information and actual customer data.
The impact of implementing solutions such as the D&B and SAS enterprise procurement solution typically can range from 5 percent to 10 percent of the organization's total purchasing expenditures, depending on the firm's size. Because the D&B and SAS enterprise procurement solution facilitates an understanding of business relationships between both customers and vendors through comprehensive information, it is an instrumental tool to manage supply and demand chain functions. Once in place, the solution delivers critical support to procurement professionals' decision-making processes.
"The D&B and SAS enterprise procurement solution can significantly improve company profitability, specifically companies whose external purchases account for a major portion of operating revenues," said Clare Gillan, vice president of applications research, International Data Corp. "The savings achieved from leveraged buying power coupled with risk reduction due to more effective strategic sourcing could provide a handsome ROI for those implementing this solution."
The D&B and SAS enterprise procurement solution relies on the United Nations/Standard Products and Services Classification (UN/SPSC) system, already accepted by leading corporate purchasing card providers. The UN/SPSC is emerging as a global standard for classifying goods and services among corporate and government purchasers.
"The first step in any process improvement is to understand where you are at present," said Christine Kelly, SAS Institute program manager for the D&B and SAS enterprise procurement solution. "Many organizations simply don't know how much they buy, what they buy or whom they buy from. The need, then, is an open information warehouse and decision support based hierarchical numbering system that allows identification for either a broad product group or a specific classification."
Unique Features and Benefits
The D&B and SAS enterprise procurement solution is unsurpassed as a comprehensive procurement-decision support system and incorporates the following:
Managing the purchasing process helps companies to identify new vendors that offer the lowest amount of risk, the best price and the required level of quality and service. The D&B and SAS enterprise procurement solution relies on data rationalization - a step that helps bring about increased efficiencies in sales transactions through improved financial systems integration. The data rationalization process allows companies to implement a common classification system for the products and services they buy to more effectively manage their corporate purchases and expenditures.
"The UN/SPSC leverages D&B's experience of providing information-based decision support tools to help companies make the most informed business decisions," comments Frank Fitzsimmons, senior vice president global marketing at D&B. "This solution is an important step in establishing the D&B and SAS enterprise procurement solution and UN/SPSC classification system as the global standard for identifying the optimum suppliers, goods and services."
The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation
Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), a company of The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, is the world's leading provider of business-to-business credit, marketing and purchasing information and receivable management services. Companies of all sizes in all industries around the world use D&B information in their supply and demand chains. By integrating D&B information into business systems and processes, companies can better manage their customers and suppliers and achieve a direct and seamless link between back-office and front office operations. The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, which also includes Moody's Investors Service, is headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J. and employs approximately 12,500 people in 37 countries with reported 1998 revenue from continuing operations of $1.93 billion. Additional information about Dun & Bradstreet is available through its website, http://www.dnb.com.
About SAS Institute
SAS Institute, one of the top 10 independent software vendors, is the leader in decision support and data warehousing, providing integrated enterprise information-delivery solutions. The Institute markets packaged business solutions for vertical industry and departmental applications, as well as an integrated suite of software tools and consulting services, that allow companies to transform the wide variety of data within their organizations into information that business users and researchers need to make better decisions. SAS software and services are used at more than 33,000 business, government, and university sites in 115 countries. Founded in 1976, SAS Institute is the world's largest privately held software company with 1998 revenue of $871 million.
Please visit SAS Institute's Web site: http://www.sas.com.