The success of any spend analysis solution is properly designing the hierarchies (or taxonomies) used to analyze the data. Reusing an existing taxonomy designed for transaction processing can get a system up and running quickly, but will deliver poor analytical performance. ePlus assists customers in creating a taxonomy optimized for strategic analysis
Data Classification Best Practices
The most significant challenge in deploying Spend Analysis is assigning spend to its proper commodity classification. While the first step is developing the hierarchy, the more intricate step is in understanding and utilizing the spend information in order to classify. We help our customers use requisitions, invoices, purchase orders, and receipt records to classify spend accurately and to the appropriate level of detail.
We work closely with the client in the earliest phases of the project to ascertain how this classification will work for each specific commodity and data source. The rules we derive from this analysis are then built into our Extract, Transform & Load engine (ETL) so that they can be uniformly applied to all data loads processed on an on-going basis. We have also designed an automated process to automatically address data loading with minimal human intervention. We determine and encode the rules for when data should be loaded into the Data Mart, and automatically notify key contacts when upon completion of the data load.
