Zycus releases new case study on procurement-driven performance improvement at FEI Company

PRINCETON, N.J. December 22, 2011 – Zycus, a world leader in Procurement Technology Solutions, has released an in-depth case study on how FEI Company, a world leader in the production of electron microscopes for nanoscale research, is working with Zycus to enable procurement driven performance improvement and spend management.

Earlier this year, FEI selected Zycus’ Spend Analysis and e-Sourcing solutions as part of its effort to transform procurement. According to Paul Flamend, the Netherlands-based Global Manager of FEI’s Value Engineering Group, key tenets in the company’s procurement transformation course are to:

• Introduce enterprise spend management and related disciplines in the shortest possible timeframe (versus taking an incremental, multiyear route),
• Avoid building a large, permanent infrastructure and core competencies in strategic sourcing and specific spend management processes (such as spend analysis, sourcing event creation and execution and so forth) and
• Automate and/or outsource both tactical and strategic procurement and supply management processes wherever possible.

With annual revenues of over $800 million and three manufacturing facilities spread over the U.S., Netherlands and Czech Republic, FEI’s transaction data exists across nine ERP systems and is expressed in several languages including English, Dutch, Czech, Japanese and Chinese. “We wanted to professionalize our approach to creating and maintaining spending visibility going forward” says Flamend. “We have found Zycus to be flexible in helping us to manage around [our constraints] and also highly knowledgeable in guiding us through important decisions around how to structure our spending data.” Flamend adds.

We make a practice of identifying real spend management and strategic sourcing opportunities that are ripe for the picking,” says Anurag Dixit, Vice President of Global
Marketing at Zycus. “If we can do this having little specific insight into a customer’s industry or supply base, it becomes very easy to imagine what the company’s knowledgeable sourcing and spend management professionals will be able to accomplish when they have clean, timely, and detailed spending data combined with powerful – yet easy-to-use – analytics and sourcing-event execution tools. ” With FEI, we have been able to help improve procurement performance in a highly specialized industry by combining our procurement expertise with a constant focus on being flexible to specific customer needs. This case study can be an excellent reference for any procurement professional looking to make a definitive business case for a technology implementation that drives procurement performance improvement.”