Services

Vendor Master Cleanup

Our free-text analysis software can be used to identify duplicate vendors in you organisations vendor master files. Marshan technologies provides a service where you send us your vendor master file and we send you a file indicating possible duplications.

• Does your organisation have examples of the same vendor registered several times in the vendor master file?
• Does your organisation have different vendor master files for different business entities?

How will it help?

It is possible to manually search through your vendor master data to find duplicates, but this is time consuming. The vendor master cleanup report fast tracks the identification of duplicate vendors.
The report is typically used to remove or disable duplicate vendors in your purchasing system and as a tool to accurately calculate the actual consolidated spend per vendor.

Having duplicates in your vendor master results in inaccurate information, inefficiency and wasted efforts.

Eliminating duplicates in your vendor master will help you to:

• Accurately report on spend per vendor
• Reduce the number of active vendors
• Reduce the number of payments and vendor accounts that need to be balanced
• Reduce the administrative effort associated with maintaining your vendor master data.

The trick is to find the duplicate vendors. This can be a very time consuming process if done manually.

The technology developed for description based spend analysis is well suited to the analysis of any set of complex unstructured data.

We offer consulting and analytical services to help organisations make sense of large, complex messy data sets.

SL Catalogue Management

The searchlight spend tree is the perfect place to create and manage catalogue data. As you drill down from high level spend categories the lowest category is the specific item or service purchased. When preparing for a tender. The commodity manager will drill into the detail of that commodity. The commodity manager may build several new groups representing items that were purchased without a material number because a material number does not yet exist. The Commodity manager can convert these groups to item master groups. Then all descriptions in these item master groups are converted to the master group description. These new items can be used in the tender process even before they have been added to the material master.

SL MatchIT

Searchlight MatchIT is designed to help organisations to quickly clean-up master data. MatchIT is based on similar technology to Searchlight Spend Analysis. It breaks descriptions into key words, assigns weightings to the key words and compares descriptions to each other.

MatchIT is used to

• Identify duplicate items in material or vendor master data (Data cleaning projects).
• Match equivalent items together when merging two material master files (Integration projects).
• MatchIT can be used to compare free-text descriptions to the material master and flag free-text requisition lines where a material number should be used.
• By comparing free-Text to the material MatchIT can give a daily report indication free-text items that could be added to the material master.

Forecasting

The forecasting module allows commodity and contract managers to create cost breakdown structures from existing indices. These cost breakdown structures can be linked to items or categories in the spend tree. Forecasted prices and values can then be calculated by changing the future values of the base indices.

• Compare the effect of changing indices on the future prices of different supplier supplying the same thing with different cost breakdown structures.
• Quantifiable method of developing a budget