FEI Makes Direct & Indirect Spend Visibility a Way of Life for Procurement

Eindhoven, Netherlands August 2014 – Zycus, a world leader in Procurement Technology solutions across the source-to-pay cycle, highlights FEI as a global manufacturer that has:

• Achieved above-average organizational adoption& usage rates for its Spend Analysis tools across both direct and indirect spending categories.
• Continued to refine and innovate its spend analysis approaches as a means for ensuring contract compliance, and informing negotiation and other high-level strategies for managing its relationships with critical suppliers.

Having the capability to view and link spending from PO to invoice transactions enables us to follow compliance much more closely, which is especially useful on the indirect side of our spend,” says a Project Lead of FEI’s Value Engineering Group

Headquartered in Hillsboro, OR, FEI designs, manufacturers and supports a broad range of high-performance electron, ion and light microscopy workflows that provide images and answers in the micro-, nano- and picometer scales. FEI operates multiple locations across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

FEI first implemented the Zycus Spend Analysis solution back in 2009 as a means for overcoming challenges of having its spending data distributed across nine ERP source systems in multiple languages, including English, Dutch, Czech, Japanese and Chinese. Out of necessity at the time, FEI built its initial spend-data cube on the basis of purchase order (PO) transactions. Since that time, the company has migrated to a unified ERP backbone (with an expansion from nine to 12 instances) and has added a second spend-data cube deriving from supplier invoice transactions.

“Having the capability to view and link spending from PO to invoice transactions enables us to follow compliance much more closely, which is especially useful on the indirect side of our spend,” says a Project Lead of FEI’s Value Engineering Group. “As a public company driven by quarterly business performance, it is really quite useful for us to have ready access to accurate, monthly spending data, which enables us to see trends and predict outcomes more accurately. We also visit each quarter with our 20 most critical suppliers; having accurate monthly spend insights in hand makes those meetings more productive and valuable.”

“FEI is a great example of a company that has, not only implemented a Spend Analysis solution, but has worked systematically and diligently to take spend analysis from ad hoc activity to systematic and embedded procurement capability,” observes Zycus CEO and founder Aatish Dedhia. “Indeed, a recent new-feature release for our Spend Analysis solution enables automated scheduling and generation of useful reports according to a company’s spend-data refresh timetable. That feature was very much inspired by requests from FEI’s power-user base for more automated spend reporting in support of the company’s established strategic sourcing and supplier management workflows.”