SpendHQ: Categorization Accuracy Improved by 30%

Categorization Accuracy Improved by 30%

Navigate your spend.

“By employing a SaaS spend analytics solution combined with sourcing and category expertise, SpendHQ enables Zebra with improved visibility that leads to more consistent identification of sourcing opportunities.”

— Ammar Al-Rifai, Sr. Manager, Global Indirect Procurement

Complexity of the Problem: A leader in delivering industry-tailored, end-to-end solutions that intelligently connect people, assets and data, Zebra Technologies helps its customers make business-critical decisions to empower their front line and give them a performance edge. While transforming business is at the heart of Zebra, scaling its rapid growth operationally has brought with it new opportunities for global procurement across North America, EMEA and APAC. ORGANIZATION

Zebra Technologies NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES

7,000 INDUSTRY

Technology

Due to the substantial acquisition of Motorola Solutions’ Enterprise business a few years earlier and the integration of operational and supply chain teams, the global procurement team was looking at reconciling over $500M in indirect spend. But getting spend visibility using manual tools was testing the limits and patience of both Zebra’s category and procurement managers.

The Challenge of Manual Spend Analysis: BUSINESS CHALLENGES

Lack of spend visibility after acquisitions while managing a custom taxonomy of over 100 categories SPENDHQ SOLUTION

SpendHQ Spend visibility

At the time, spend analysis was accomplished using a patchwork of Excel spreadsheets which made spend and category analysis efforts excruciatingly slow and cumbersome. For instance, any spend data refresh or adjustments for reporting, relied on Zebra IT to pull and consolidate spend from several different enterprise systems including two separate ERPs, a T&E platform and a travel system, plus p-cards. Moreover, there was the challenge of categorization taxonomy. Managing a custom taxonomy of over 100 categories was incredibly difficult because the manual process promoted a lack of consistency with how the data was classified and promoted a lack of trust in spend analysis efforts.

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Navigate your spend.

Finding a Versatile Solution:

Driving Adoption for Business Results:

To improve accuracy and build more trust with the business, the procurement team decided to evaluate the leading spend analysis solutions in the market. The goal was to find a provider that offered a solution that was fast, scalable, simple to use, but could also act as an extension of its team.

By selecting SpendHQ, Zebra would benefit from a best-of-breed spend analysis platform while leveraging its expertise in spend data consolidation and categorization. This would allow Zebra’s global procurement team to focus more on its expertise at managing categories while building knowledge with more consistent results.

While the initial implementation was successful, there was no mandate for utilizing the spend analysis tool. Understanding that old habits are sometimes hard to break, the next step in the process was getting Zebra’s wider global category management team onboard.

In the beginning of 2018, Stuart Andrews, Director of Global Indirect Procurement, Stuart Andrews, a new mandate was adopted to refocus indirect procurement by industrializing templates and standardizing process. For spend and category strategy efforts, this meant leveraging the SpendHQ team’s expertise and increasing the usage of the spend analysis tool as a single “source of truth”.

In early 2017, Ammar Al-Rifai, Senior Manager of Global Indirect Procurement, led a team of nine global category managers through the implementation effort with the SpendHQ team. By applying its proven data optimization methodology for data normalization and categorization, the SpendHQ team loaded Zebra’s enterprise system data in February, and by March was live with the tool.

A year later with procurement’s new vision in full gear, the Global Indirect Procurement Team has established improved consistency in category analytics and for identifying spend fragmentation and sourcing opportunities. Leveraging the SpendHQ team’s sourcing and category knowledge, Zebra has experienced a 30 percent increase in spend classification accuracy.

Moreover, the time to conduct routine spend analysis tasks now averages 15 minutes versus 1-2 hours it took before. Conservatively speaking, that’s a 400% improvement in efficiency across approximately 200 sourcing projects conducted annually.

In just six weeks, Zebra had a new spend analytics solution in place, but also now had a service driven solution and a strategic partner to promote spend classification accuracy.

“Today, any spend analysis discussion we have must originate from the SpendHQ platform, establishing the solution as a single source of truth.” — Stuart Andrews, Director of Global

Zebra now has a more accurate view of spend data across the organization globally. Using SpendHQ, the Indirect Procurement Team has laid the foundations to address Zebra’s wider business goals and has become a key factor in procurement’s contributions to the company’s success both today and in the future.

Indirect Procurement

ENJOY A WHOLE NEW LEVEL OF CONTROL Are you ready to take control of your spend data? With SpendHQ, you can identify sourcing opportunities, manage compliance and drive real savings.

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