As a large diversified Utility currently providing more than 150 communities in North America with safe water, electricity and gas, this company has many assets and purchases to manage. With its growing footprint of over 4000 circuit miles of primary distribution lines, feeders and substations (not to mention the significant water, gas and fibre optic distribution businesses), comes an extremely large and diverse portfolio of purchases, all of which today pass through the existing ORACLE Financials system.
The very experienced procurement management team however, felt that the correct level of spend visibility was just not available within the existing systems to provide optimum savings opportunities. While achieving true spend visibility for these operational and project purchase line items would unlock a sizeable savings opportunity, the business needed first to overcome the real challenge of actually identifying accurately each line item’s contractable spend class. Refresh Desktop was selected to do this task in-house and driven by the existing purchasing team, who succesfully completed online training in Q1 2024.
Over the next few weeks, a large number of materials and services, primarily free text Purchase Orders from ORACLE, will be commodity coded to UNSPSC, de-duplicated against themselves and the existing master file of items, and then loaded back from Refresh Desktop in to the Microsoft Based reporting system. The current stock Item Master from ORACLE will also be cleaned, de-duplicated and spend classified to UNSPSC, thus covering all purchased items and services (no matter the operational or strategic buying process followed), resulting in significant new visibility in spend across the entire business.