NEW ORLEANS (Supply Chain World) April 22, 2002 - Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), the leading provider of business analytics software, today introduced Informatica Strategic Sourcing Analytics, the only complete analytics software package designed to help companies continually analyze their procurement spending across the enterprise - for both direct and indirect materials and services - in order to strategically reduce costs. Built on the company's leading data integration platform, Informatica Strategic Sourcing Analytics is a module within Informatica Applications that delivers rapid time-to-value, usually in less than 90 days, by providing powerful sourcing analytics out-of-the-box such as analysis of spending by commodities, by suppliers and by corporate cost centers.
“Most companies recognize the need to reduce costs but lack the visibility into their global spend to make strategic decisions,” said Karen Peterson, vice president and research director at GartnerGroup. “With strategic sourcing analytics, organizations can collect and analyze all aspects of their supplier data from disparate sources and leverage best-practice metrics to get an accurate overview of total spending. They can also view supplier scorecards, rank their supplier base, and guide their organization through workflows that identify areas for cost consolidation and optimal sourcing strategies.”
“Motorola has found that spend visibility and analysis with Informatica Applications is an essential next step in the Motorola Global Non-production Procurement (GNPP) initiative for enterprise spend management,” said Mike De Runtz, senior director, Shared IT Services, Motorola. “We chose Informatica Applications for sourcing analytics because of its ability to rapidly and easily source from disparate systems, and its metrics that let us achieve enterprise visibility of spend.”
Informatica Strategic Sourcing Analytics distinguishes itself as an integrated analytic solution that combines a robust data-integration platform for sourcing disparate data, best-practice metrics and an analytic data model for strategic sourcing, and an easy-to-use analytic delivery platform with features like supplier scorecards and analytic workflows to simplify spending analysis. The product provides decision-makers in operations, procurement, supply chain and finance with a pre-built dashboard of metrics to help make better decisions in four areas: corporate spend, supplier performance management, quality and supplier payment analyses.
“In today's economy, cost containment is a priority for Global 2000 companies. Strategic sourcing offers companies an effective mechanism they can use to help quickly control their expenses,” said Sanjay Poonen, vice president and general manager, Informatica Applications. “Because Informatica's industry leading data-integration platform and a pre-packaged data model with industry best-practice metrics are at the core of this new strategic sourcing analytics offering, we can produce an enterprise view across spend, supplier and quality quickly and more efficiently than other solutions in the market.”
“We're pleased that Informatica has adopted the Supply Chain Council (SCOR) model for its strategic sourcing and supply chain analytic applications,” said Scott Stephens, chief technology officer, Supply Chain Council. “The primary objective of SCOR is to assist practitioners in improving their entire supply chain performance - including strategic sourcing. Our SCOR model has been carefully researched by experts and tested in the field with industry best-practice metrics and models for both global and site-specific projects.”
In addition to adopting the SCOR model, the Informatica Strategic Sourcing Analytics module includes the following components:
- Pre-built metrics on sourcing -- including spend, supply management, quality and supplier payment metrics based on industry best practices. For example, the package contains a set of metrics for continuously tracking actual spend, requested spend, actual vs. planned spend and cost variance from contract.
- The Informatica Data Integration Platform with packaged business adapters to source data from a variety of disparate sources including Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and even proprietary sourcing systems.
- Analytic dashboards and executive scorecards on suppliers with alerts for continuous evaluation of strategic sourcing metrics.
- Easy-to-use analytic tools to rank supplier performance and product quality.
- Patent-pending Analytic Workflows to uncover the root causes of sourcing issues. For example, analytic workflows can intuitively guide users from total commodity spend, to suppliers of those commodities, and finally to suppliers' performance and quality metrics.
- Data mining tools to mine supplier data.
- Seamless integration with leading third-party data quality solutions
Pricing and Availability
Informatica Strategic Sourcing Analytics is immediately available. Pricing starts at $400,000. For more information, please visit http://www.informatica.com/
Informatica provides business analytics software that enables decision makers to transform business insight into competitive advantage. Informatica offers the industry's only integrated business analytics suite, including an enterprise data integration platform, cross value chain analytic applications, and real-time delivery of analytics via Web, wireless and voice. More than 1,500 customers worldwide, including 60 percent of the Fortune 100, rely on Informatica software to integrate, analyze and deliver critical information to managers, executives and other decision makers to optimize business performance. For more information, call 1.650.385.5000 (1.800.970.1179 in the U.S.), or visit the Informatica Web site at
http://www.informatica.com/
