New York’s Electricity, Natural gas and Steam provider Plugs into Zycus’ Advanced Spend Analytics

PRINCETON, NJ SEPTEMBER 30, 2014 – Zycus, the leading source-to-pay procurement solutions provider, announced today that one of the largest investor-owned energy companies in the United States is going to implement its Advanced Spend Analysis solution.

Spearheading the effort is category section manager at energy-related products and services provider, who recognized an opportunity with Zycus, to:

• Scale up and cost effectively enable all of its strategic spend category managers to conduct advanced spend analytics on demand
• Dramatically improve turnaround times and relative timeliness of the spend data available to its strategic category managers.

“Instead of having just one person capable of analyzing our spend data, our entire procurement team will now gain access to sophisticated analysis and reporting tools,” the company executive says. “We will also be putting fresh spend data into our category managers’ hands very soon after each business quarter closes. We expect this to engender a great deal of productivity, collaboration and creative analyses to identify opportunities we might not have seen using our former, more manually-driven solution.”

What also made Zycus attractive to #1 among ‘S&P 500 utility companies in the 2011 Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index’ was its ability to easily adapt its automated solution for transaction classification (AutoClass) to an already established three-level classification taxonomy that the organization wished to preserve.

For example, a Proof of Concept (POC) initiative undertaken with Zycus last August uncovered instances of purchase price variance (PPV) among the New York energy provider’s divisions for same or similar products purchased from certain suppliers within similar time frames.“Our former setup for Spend Analysis did not enable us to easily spot those types of differences,” observes the company executive.

What also made Zycus attractive to #1 among ‘S&P 500 utility companies in the 2011 Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index’ was its ability to easily adapt its automated solution for transaction classification (AutoClass) to an already established three-level classification taxonomy that the organization wished to preserve. “While we wanted to stay with our existing schema,” the executive adds, “Zycus’ significant expertise in the realm of transaction classification, has also helped us to find opportunities for improving and refining our taxonomy.”

“The Electric Service provider is ahead in the game of Spend Analysis because it has recently undertaken a comprehensive initiative to homogenize its ERP back end,” observes Aatish Dedhia, CEO, Zycus Inc. “It means they are starting with an unusually consistent and rich set of transaction data, which, with the right advanced analysis tools in hand, will empower their procurement pros to conduct highly sophisticated and innovative analyses to uncover strategic sourcing, negotiation and spend management opportunities that many other companies may be missing.”

Implementation of the Zycus Spend Analysis solution is already well under way at the company; data refresh will occur quarterly.