ACS- Apt provides data optimization services which assist our clients in their inventory optimization, spend analysis, supply chain management and e-Procurement initiatives. We work with several companies worldwide in many verticals including Oil & Gas, Manufacturing and Healthcare. Our consulting and delivery teams work closely with partners and clients to ensure complete success of their IT initiatives.

ACS-Apt provides complete range of catalog content services, which include data audits, classification, data cleansing, data enrichment and content creation. We can handle any data type as input and can provide any output format. We use right mix of content knowledge, domain expertise and automation in the process in order to provide low cost high quality content.

Data Audits
ACS-Apt can do a detailed data audit on the current situation of the data quality. These findings are then used to determine the roadmap for data processing effort including data enrichment levels required. During the data audits, one can estimate the data problems residing in the system like duplicates; coding errors etc and recommend necessary remedies. Assessing the current data problems do require an experienced "eye" which ACS-Apt surely has!

Data Classification
Meaningful spend analysis is essential fuel for pursuing supply chain cost reduction efforts. The analysis of spend patterns depends on having accurate product information that is properly classified.

To global schema: ACS-Apt provides classification services to classify the products and services to well known global standard schema such as UNSPSC, eCl@ss, NAICS, MESC, NIGP and SMD etc.

To proprietary schema: ACS-Apt provides classification services to classify the products and services to any in-house / proprietary schema of manufacturer/supplier in the domain of MRO, Life Science, Healthcare, Chemicals, IT and Office Supplies.

Taxonomy building: ACS-Apt team of taxonomy experts can build a schema to specific domain tailored to customer needs. This comes with category codes, category definition, attribute names and attribute definitions cross reference to any existing schema.

Schema mapping: ACS-Apt team of taxonomy experts well versed with classification hierarchies and can map any proprietary schema to global schemas.

Data Cleansing
Clean, accurate product and vendor data provide the foundation for maximizing the ROI of technology investments and for completing meaningful spend analysis. ACS-Apt assists in creating and maintaining clean item master and vendor master files.

ACS-Apt specializes in providing data cleansing. It employs a panel of domain experts who work with operational teams in order to arrive at right noun-modifier combination, its attributes and the correctness of attribute values. ACS-Apt can provide attribute extraction to any industry standards or it can develop its own set of attributes using internal domain knowledge.

ACS-Apt offers complete range of data cleansing services, which include:

• Data normalization and rationalization
  
• Duplicate part identification and removal
  
• Attribute extraction and population
  
• Abbreviation expansion
  
• Supplier and manufacturer rationalization
  

Noun/Modifier Identification: Noun / modifiers help in unambiguously identify a product and helps in easy grouping the products. ACS-Apt can assign Noun / Modifiers to products with the help of existing descriptions.

De-duplication: Duplicates are identified and removed by adopting various permutations of pattern matching rules, database queries and manual inspection.

Re-arranging the description: Using our team of highly experienced content engineers, input descriptions are re-arranged in the order of "Noun, Modifier, Defining attributes, Manufacturer Name, Part Number". ACS-Apt has also expertise in creating short description to limit number of characters.

Attribute extraction: ACS-Apt can provide attribute extraction to any industry standard attribute schema and can also develop new set of attribute by using in-house domain expert's knowledge.

Normalization: ACS-Apt can format the data entities such as Manufacturer/supplier names, attributes values, abbreviations, Unit of measurements etc to a uniform and consistent values based on a specific Style-guide.

Data Enrichment
ACS-Apt provides data enrichment services, which may involve sourcing content from various sources. Alongside web research, we do manual sourcing in order to collect all possible critical product information. Completely attributed data along with digital images, contact information, and PDF documents are sourced.

ACS-Apt can perform data enrichment by employing any or all the below steps.

• Data enrichment by sourcing manufacturer websites
  
• Data enrichment by "manual sourcing" i.e. by contacting suppliers for additional data
  
• Data enrichment by collecting additional data by "plant walk-downs"
  

By sourcing Manufacturer/Supplier website: ACS-Apt adopts the followings steps to enrich the data by using this method:

• List of distinct Manufacturers are compiled from the input data
  
• For each Manufacturer, his official / authorized web sources are collected. This task is performed by a separate team that is specialized in locating online resources.
  
• Manufacturer website URLs, Images and Data sheets are recorded.
  
• From the given input, descriptions are analyzed and appropriate Noun-modifiers are assigned (as per the attribute schema preferred by client).
  

• Attribute templates are selected for the individual Noun-modifier combinations and applied to the record.
  
• Images are sourced, resized if required, cleaned-up if required.
  
• Values are populated from the input and websites for these attributes.
  
• Quality checks re carried out during the production process and before delivery.
  

Calling Process
Supplier sourcing or manual sourcing is the process whereby suppliers are directly contacted for product information when web scraping doesn't yield results. ACS-Apt will engage the suppliers to get product information in a time-bound and convenient manner. Suppliers are contacted by email / phone call / fax by ACS-Apt representatives.

Plant Walk-Down
ACS-Apt professionals are specialized in onsite sourcing of parts information. ACS-Apt has executed several on-site projects and has gained valuable expertise. The information is sourced from various sources within the plant like Stores, Item Master, Purchase orders/requisitions, Codification rules, Tags, Nameplates, Catalogs, etc. Additionally, the items are physically assessed and measured to gather technical data.