IntelleCat™ Features
IntelleCat Value Proposition™
Most companies would really like to be getting more spend through their e-procurement system. To do that, they need more catalogs on-line, and they need to provide a more compelling search experience for users. Why? Because without on-line catalogs, requisitioners have limited commodities they can buy on-line, and without a compelling search mechanism, buyers tend to resort to other ways of submitting purchase requisitions.
Used in conjunction with any existing e-procurement system, our software, IntelleCat™ (Intelligent eCatalog Management System), is the solution to both catalog management and catalog search issues.
1. Immediate hard-dollar savings– Bring catalogs on-line faster:
Consider the following question: How many catalogs would you need to bring on-line to drive 50% of your spend through your e-procurement system? 100? 200? More?
According to market research, the average cost to bring a single catalog on-line in CIF (or other) standardized format is $20,000 to $30,000. The time required is 2 to 6 weeks.
The math is easy: 100 catalogs at $20,000 is two million dollars. Note that this does not even take into account the wait time of 200 person-weeks before you can get to that goal of 50% of your spend being driven through Ariba.
- With IntelleCat™, you can be up and running with a new supplier catalog in any format within minutes. (This includes HTML websites, punch-out sites, and other record and page-based formats.) No catalog conversion, aggregation, nor specific catalog format is required.
- Moreover, with IntelleCat™, you are in control. You don’t have to wait for suppliers to get content on-line. Thus you save the costs of lost opportunity.
2. Ongoing, sustainable soft-dollar savings – Rapidly search catalogs:
Consider: How much time do your users spend searching for catalog items?
Our research indicates that the average catalog search by a non-expert requires approximately 10 minutes. That’s 10 minutes to locate just one item from your universe of catalogs. With IntelleCat™ that number drops to under 1 minute!
The math: Eliminating 9 minutes per item, if you process 1,000 transactions per day, that’s 9,000 minutes. If your company operates 250 days per year, that’s 2,250,000 minutes or 37,500 hours. If the average hourly wage across all of your users is $25, then that insignificant 9 minutes turns into $937,500 per year. That’s nearly a million dollars in soft-dollar savings per year. Forever.
- The IntelleCat™ search mechanism is designed exclusively for B2B catalogs, allowing requisitioners to find products, in any type of e-catalog, quickly.
- Moreover, IntelleCat™ saves search paths, in a comprehensive search index, that can be used to look up items in the future even more quickly.
- IntelleCat™ allows searches in 17 Western European languages.
- IntelleCat’s™ search is what language experts call "semantically unconstrained". In other words, IntelleCat™ searches the way people really think, not the way a database designer wants them to.
3. Cost avoidance as your enterprise grows – Empowering buyers:
Consider your professional buyers' time. How valuable is it?
IntelleCat™ can help you avoid hundreds of thousands of dollars in new salaries.
- IntelleCat™ captures procurement knowledge. As buyers go about the normal business of buying, IntelleCat™ ‘remembers’ what they do. It retains information on the items purchased, as well as buyer’s comments and instructions. So all of this expertise can be leveraged in the future. By all of your buyers, across the entire enterprise.
- Novice buyers become efficient users after just a few sessions.
- Senior procurement staff can be freed up for more strategic activities.
- As your business grows and your spending increases, you don’t need to increase headcount in the procurement department to deal with day-to-day tactical spending.
In conclusion, IntelleCat™ relieves the catalog enablement bottleneck, provides a more satisfying search experience, and allows your organization to capture and share procurement knowledge. In short, IntelleCat™ is Soft ware – Hard value