Finding the needle in a data-heavy haystack
GSA's organized portal has boosted its sales 25%
Staff -- Purchasing, 1/13/2005 2:00:00 AM
How do you arrange seven million items in an e-procurement system to make it easier for customers to search and locate products or services quickly and accurately?
For the General Services Administration (GSA), it was no easy task, and it required teamwork between Federal Supply Service personnel and Zycus, the software provider. The commodity data had to be classified and categorized, and then adapted to new and improved search systems designed to improve customer satisfaction.
"Contracting officers using the GSA Advantage federal purchasing system now can find the proverbial needle in the haystack when searching for products," says Nancy Goode, director of GSA's Systems Management Center. "Using software that sorts the Federal Supply Service's procurement portal's 13,000 catalogs and 7.6 million products, buyers now can drill down to the exact product they are looking for, instead of having to sift through mounds of results."
"It is a watershed instance in the history of the technology initiatives by the federal government," says Al Iagnemmo, director of electronic business for the GSA, "simply because of the scope of the project—the numbers are huge and so many people from both the supply base and the customer base [are] affected."
The payback: more than 105,000 new customers registered to use the GSA Advantage e-procurement system in fiscal 2004, ended October 31. Sales through GSA Advantage exceeded $277 million, an increase of 25% as compared to the previous fiscal year. "And, the online customer satisfaction results in the search area increased three percentage points," adds Iagnemmo.
Details about the upgrade of GSA Advantage were presented by Iagnemmo and Zycus marketing officials at PURCHASING magazine's recent online Global Procurement Conference. The presentation is at www.globalprocurement.purchasing.com. In a nutshell, here's what happened:
After nine fiscal years, GSA Advantage had processed more than two million orders for more than $1.1 billion but administrators felt the $84 million invested on the system hadn't yet yielded anticipated e-commerce results. Online surveys by GSA revealed the two biggest problems were searching and finding the right products through the 7.6 million-item system to make informed purchase decisions. GSA realized that for optimizing search, the solution was to categorize the products and services records into 19,000 categories agreeable to 12,000 suppliers and users.
That was accomplished by using a commodity classification product that is a core component of Zycus Spend Data Management solutions software. Zycus established an automated procedure for daily categorization of newly added and modified items. The collaborative procedure ensured that the items were classified accurately and also in cases where the descriptions were found to be inadequate, they would be returned to vendors, assisting them in improving descriptions to enable successful categorization and resubmission of items. Overall, "the biggest benefit is that we now allow buyers to find more of the right products, and they are buying more," says Iagnemmo.
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