Data management challenges go well beyond data classification and report visualization

Decades of procurement transformational experience is codified inside Sievo’s unique system design

The heart of Sievo is a system design that integrates different parts of the overall solution. More than a piece of code, Sievo’s system design is the codified result of a wealth of experience within procurement. In essence it is a record of what generates value across and within direct and indirect spend categories. It’s that record that makes it possible to accurately predict, measure and manage procurement performance from ideas to cash.

We would be happy to tell you more about what makes our software unique in the course of a meeting, but this is all we can publicly share.

From Source to Screen … and in Between

Technically, Sievo is different from the other procurement solutions on the market.

Starting with the source

Enabling your organization to intelligently predict its future spend, manage savings opportunities from ideas to cash and measure the financial contribution of procurement to the bottom line requires a significant amount of data.

Much of that data already exists within the purchasing and accounting ledgers of your multiple ERP systems. And when not it is often found in other internal databases where headcounts, currency rates or bill of materials and other data are stored. If internal systems are not sufficient, suppliers are likely to have it.

Getting all this information is often not an issue. You might even have access to it yourself. What often becomes a bottleneck is transforming the data into something meaningful that can be used for analysis, derivation and projection.

At Sievo, we fundamentally believe that this analytical burden should not be yours. Your role should be to extract the data, whatever the format, and let us take care of the rest.

Instead of asking you to put the data into a particular format, we will take care of the full ETL (Extract Transform Load) process for you. Having worked with 50+ different types of ERP systems and other legacies, we have codified our ETL approach to match the requirements of these different systems. Leveraging our systems and deep procurement knowledge, and using MSSIS (Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services) makes the process simple, fast, reliable and cost effective.

Ending with the screen

If your transformation program is to succeed, you’ll need all those data and analytics to be accessible. To provide you with the best experience that exists out there we have decided to power our reporting engine with QlikView. According to IDC, QlikView is the fastest growing BI software vendor- five years running.

Sievo’s reporting powered by QlikView will result in a number of benefits to you:

• In-memory processing for fast performance and associative use logic
• Unmatched visualizations
• Intuitive navigation and drill-down logic
• Powerful search capabilities and user favorites/bookmarks
• Advanced charting and reporting options and much more ...

Our partnership with QlikView will be fully transparent for you as you’ll continue to deal directly with Sievo from beginning to end and we take the full responsibility from source to screen and in between.

But Sievo is not just another dashboard. Sievo’s clients input data, change data, delete data and simulate scenarios with immediate visual output. By using the latest web technologies combined with our reporting component Sievo offers a complete user experience to harness the power of its core data engine.

The invisible machine in between

Measuring and managing procurement performance is not just a question of integration and visualization. Simply connecting your ERP systems to a business intelligence terminal is not enough.

Sievo’s procurement performance management application fills in that gap between procurement analytics and action, through four interconnecting software components: a classification and validation engine, a performance definition configuration tool, a data management tool and a calculation engine. Together they form Sievo’s Software Core.

Sievo’s classification and validation engine

Sievo’s classification engine is a full turnkey solution that will aggregate data from all your enterprise systems (ERPs and others) and transform this raw spend and supplier information into a comprehensive, unified spend profile.

Using the combination of proprietary artificial intelligence and rules -based classification, Sievo’s classification engine accurately classify spend data to the highest level of confidence.

We enhance the confidence you will have in the output by leveraging our three step validation logic. In Step 1, our system will validate the format of data; in step 2, we will validate the technical characteristic of the data and finally in step 3, we will ensure the reliability of data, i.e. answering to the question of “does that data make any business sense?”

Sievo’s performance definition configuration tool

Managing procurement performance starts by defining what is being measured. If like many of our clients, your business has reached a mature stage, you must have been exposed to the controversies between finance and procurement around savings. Often, finance sees it one way, and procurement sees it another.

Sievo’s performance definition configuration tool has been designed to align financial definitions with procurement definitions. Our definitions are fundamentally financially driven as in the end performance is measured by bottom line impact. However, within the financial definition we have found a way to isolate positive and negative, internal and external contributors to changes in spend, including what is defined as procurement performance.

Sievo’s performance definition configuration tool allows you to configure savings definitions on the basis of our pre-configured best practices and hence give you an overall performance view. But because not all categories behave the same way, we have pre-defined value drivers by categories which in turn drive their measurement, assuming you have the data needed to perform the measurement.

Our performance definition configuration tool also allows the definition of multiple reference points to reflect the versatility of options. Whether you want to measure performance from period to period, actual expenditures versus a synthetic baseline established for a specific project, or actual numbers versus a forecast for a defined period of time, you can do it.

Sievo’s data management tool

Companies often underestimate data management challenges. But crunching numbers can get very complex when you have to deal with millions of rows in different formats. Are they actual or derived? Unique or not? Are they a series of points coming from multiple sources? All require somewhat different handling.

Storing actual data, deriving data and maintaining data points is exactly what Sievo data management tool addresses. Our tool can manage:

• Actuals
• Budgets and forecasts
• Synthetic baselines
• Targets
• Cost structures
• Market indexes
• Currency tables
• Order quantity tables
• Specification tables
• Organizational dimensions
• Units of measures
• And more …

Viewed as single data points the challenge might seem manageable. However, these data actually interact with each other and interlink among each other.

Imagine, for example, measuring the performance of the packaging spend category. Not only will you need to isolate the drivers that affect packaging costs, but you will also need to address how much of the cost is driven by the pulp and paper index and other polymers. You will need to associate the index related to this, in addition, you’ll need to note the impact of order quantity, specification changes, currencies, volumes and product mix. The challenge is major.

Sievo’s calculation engine

Managing the procurement performance of a large company requires a lot of analytical power.

Sievo provides ready algorithms to manage the calculation aspects of procurement performance management, which are often problematic and extremely complex.

Sievo’s calculation logic is extremely scalable. This scalability is due to a number of parameters, including the fact that our calculation engine sits outside the other components of Sievo’s software core. With such a scalable and flexible engine, Sievo can manage the large amounts of data that your company needs to measure and manage its procurement performance.