ZUGSEIL CATIE

Typical challenges in category management are

• Different category structures (e.g., procurement vs. finance) often cannot be dynamically mapped or translated in IT-systems which challenges the collaboration and communication between stakeholders
• Special demand requirements of business stakeholders (e.g., Marketing requires extras) are often not coverd in catalogue(s) which results in non-compliant procurement activities ("maverick buying")
• Framework agreements are often partially fulfilled (e.g., agreed procurement volumes) or utilized (e.g. advantageous payment terms) and lead to increased costs (e.g., penalties, unused discounts)

Customer value

Large procurement organizations come along with two challenges :

• knowledge management and distribution - regular employees do not find the correct procurement unit/office for the procurement of a specific good easily. Catie helps any organization member to easily identify the correct procurement path, details and the appropriate contact persons driven by classification data created in PIM and AI based learning. This saves the regular employees and the procurement officers an ever-growing fraction of the time used up by mislead procurement requests. Therefore Catie is an extension module for ACCELERATE.
• collaborative category management - managing categories is essential for many business areas. Catie not only allows a professional webbased environment for managing categories - it allows advances collaboration of category strategy team and the procurement team. This collaboartion brings evolution and optimization of categories, which adapt to the demands of business.

ZUGSEIL CATIE has unique capabilities to address the aforementioned challenges in category management:

• Triage process: Triaging of employees, if employee is not able to find the desired product in the catalogue(s) --> Benefits: Improved compliance in procurement processes, increased utilization of preferred supplier contracts, enhanced productivity of employees etc.
• Category mapping: Mapping of various category structures, e.g., mapping of procurement category structure to ECLASS, UNSPSC, finance category structure etc. --> Benefits: Improved data integrity and transparency, facilitated collaboration and communication between various stakeholders
• Data insights: Providing reports about, e.g., about placed searches by employees --> Benefits: Better insights into demand patterns, desires and requirements
• USP: One-Stop-Shop with ZUGSEIL ACCELERATE, leverage of AI, b-op, integration of further catalogue(s) outside ZUGSEIL-solutions, development of purchasing syndicates

Functionality

ZUGSEIL's Catie offers a toolset for comprehensive category management in compliance with the respective procurement policies:

• Knowledge management - A tool, which holds multiple classification structures with category cards. Each of them bears all relevant information, e.g., ordering information, supplier contracts, procurement team contacts, so that employees are able to purchase required products as per procurement policies.
• Linked to operations - When a user is unable to find a product in the internal catalog shop, the user receives automatically matching categories and allows to enter a purchase requisition, which is directly forwarded to the matching procurement officer.
• Collaboration & Evolution - Allow evolutionary collaboration on category structure, permission based proposals can be made
• Central governance - Review proposals and accept or reject category structure change proposals

In detail, ZUGSEIL Catie

• Allows the organization to define their entire procurement organization structure (Units, Teams, Team-Groups)
• Allows to map the procurement organization to one or multiple product classification structures (Own, UNSPSC, ...)
• Enables functionality in ZUGSEIL Shop to find product groups and the proper responsible procurement unit/officer, depending on the shop user's organization membership
• Display information on the product group, like frame-contracts, suppliers, responsible procurement officers, ...
• Enables free-text purchase requisition entry, which is directly forwarded to the procurement organization unit and its procurement officers for processing
• The main focus of doing this, is allowing the users of the ZUGSEIL Shop to browse this product group structure together with the regular products and find at least the product group, if no matching orderable product was found. Once the user has found the product group, it allows to enter specific free text purchase requisitions which are then directed to the defined purchase organization entity and can be processed there.
• Enables collaboration of team members on change requests of the category structure and details.

Especially in organizations with large/complex purchasing structures, this saves the requesting employee and the purchasing offices a lot of time as the right people get connected immediately instead of having to search the right contact persons.

Included Applications

• App:Classification management - This tool allows distributed catalog management
• App:Classification mapping management - This tool is optimized for mapping classifications to each other