EDS Global Purchasing organization, which handles all EDS external purchases, maintains a staff of purchasing managers responsible for a multi-billion dollar procurement budget. They are accountable for all procurement decisions which include; establishment of approved vendor status, contract terms such as pricing, discounts, margins, refund information, as well as confidentiality clauses. Typically, there are between 35,000 and 70,000 contracts stored on a global repository of several million pages of unstructured text.
With so many variable contract terms buried in these million pages, rapidly locating and reviewing the precise information required for effective decision-making was time-consuming and inefficient.
According to Kas Kasravi, an EDS Fellow, "We needed to streamline and reduce costs in our procurement process, and were searching for ways to automate the task of analyzing our contracting process."
EDS decided to implement ClearForest because "We recognized that better enforcement of contract terms would provide us with significant gains. ClearForest empowered us to read, analyze, understand and better apply contract terms so that we did not miss savings opportunities due to delayed purchasing decisions or inefficient research practices." With thousands of supply contracts worldwide, these costs were significant. |
Using ClearForest Tags for text analytics, EDS successfully built and implemented a supply chain tagging infrastructure. Our Tagging platform integrated seamlessly with EDS' corporate workflow solution, extracting precisely defined contract terms from thousands of EDS contracts. Key terms such as pricing, discounts, refunds, and confidentiality agreements contained in each contract were then analyzed providing EDS increased visibility for procurement decisions. The extracted information was then stored in a standard data warehouse.
Our solution allowed EDS to consolidate existing procurement contracts while properly enforcing a variety of different contract terms. Additionally, EDS can now compare the effect of buying from approved versus non-approved vendors, and thus determine the real costs of bringing outsourced services in house. |
Overview
EDS