Case Study of Airbus

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Case Study | Airbus ‘Getting e-Procurement right by ensuring data quality from the outset’ Summary Airbus is the leading manufacturer of commercial and military aircraft. It employs modern IT systems in its operations, one of which covers General (Indirect) Procurement. This system covers engineering subcontracting, on aircraft services, large and sophisticated machinery as well as mainstream commodities like facilities management and indirect goods and services. The total annual spend on this is € 6BN. As a leading provider of expenditure analysis and classification consultancy, SPS were asked to review the UNSPSC mappings used in core ERP systems and the in-house Harmonised Materials Group (HMG) codes used in SAP R/3. Business Challenge Coding and classification are regarded as subsidiary items in most projects and often little thought is given to what structures are best used and how they will work in an operational environment. At Airbus, there were three main challenges on the HMG side. Firstly, because of the broad nature of goods & services procured and the limits of the UNSPSC version (5.03) particularly on services, the HMGs needed to be flexible enough to accommodate all goods & services likely to be procured. The descriptions needed to be understood and comprehensive enough for use in all four countries and sixteen plants where Airbus is based. They also needed to be systematic enough to be mapped to UNSPSC for high volume/low value procurement via e-catalogues. “Because of the complexity, workload and level of expertise required to overcome the third challenge, we decided to call for real expert support “ Stéphane Groves, E-Procurement Manager Data accuracy has always been paramount at Airbus and the re-organisation of their General Procurement operation, plus the need to ensure that the new systems contained accurate information, provided a

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