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Hi, I'm Susan. The Classification Guru!

I'm a specialist in data classification, supplier normalisation, taxonomy development, and data cleansing and my team and I can help your business find cost savings through spend and time management - supporting better, more informed business decisions.

About Us

Data Classification (inc. Normalisation)

Spend data classification can provide more visibility & reporting from your data, offering cost savings, insights into over-spending, fraudulent activity or incorrect supplier charges.

Taxonomy Customisation

Taxonomies can either be too generic or too specific, both resulting in poor classification and restricted visibility on spend.

Supplier Cleansing

If you have an aged system, you most likely have multiple versions of the same supplier with different payment terms, different addresses, and even different, older company names. Cleanse your suppliers to ensure they are paid on the right terms, and are being contacted at the right address.

Data Cleansing

It’s more important than ever to make sure your customer data is up to date, accurate and relevant.

If you are changing CRM systems you will need to cleanse and prep your data beforehand to avoid issues.

Online Training

Online training is live and the participants are taken through the process step by step.

It can be carried out in one large session or smaller sessions and there is the option for standard or customised training.

Make sure your data has its COAT on.

What's COAT?

Why work with The Classification Guru?

Right first time.

Your data is 100% classified, including the tail spend - no shortcuts. You won’t find an “unclassified”, “tail spend”, “misc” or “other” classification that you have to correct further down the line, it will all be accurate, relevant and useful to give you better visibility on your spend data from day one.

This level of accuracy can only come from nearly a decade of classifying spend data, and a further 8 years working in a corporate environment.

Let's Get Started

We are now set up for success for our implementation of a new spend analytic tool.

We are set ourselves the challenge of standardising our spend taxonomy and made the decision to use the taxonomy that more than one site was using, as the starting point. What Susan then helped us to do in bring the outside in, to make sure we had not missed any spend areas and we had find the right balance between granularity and a user friendly taxonomy. Susan made some good suggestions on improvements we could make and what was impressive was how quickly she was able to turn this around, particularly due to the amount of data we provided her with, the different languages it included and the different formats. We are now set up for success for our implementation of a new spend analytic tool.

Twinings

OVO

Working with Susan has been a breath of fresh air

Working with Susan has been a breath of fresh air. Her insights on how to tackle the up-front cleansing and ongoing maintenance of our external third party supplier spend data has helped us to completely reset the way we approach business compliance conversations with our internal colleagues. We now have accurate, timely data feeding into monthly spend dashboards and compliance reports that the business trusts and uses to drive behaviour change. What has impressed me the most about The Classification Guru team is that they don’t just present a theoretical vision on powerpoint, they actually understand and do the work themselves, and then go over and beyond to make sure you have a sustainable solution in place after they leave. And all with big smiles and fun along the way. Highly recommended!

Procurement Enablement Director

Consumer Insights Business

I have no idea how Susan managed to accurately classify so much data in such a short period of time

We found the Classification Guru while looking to establish a brand new global indirect procurement function, and having found our GL code usage to have been too inconsistently applied to be useful for classification purposes.

Working with Susan was very straightforward, and with her help we were able to classify around 95% of our several thousand global suppliers within just a few weeks, with a high level of accuracy, and at a very reasonable overall cost. This was invaluable in allowing us to develop our spend analytics very early in our project. I have no idea how Susan managed to accurately classify so much data in such a short period of time, but I would have no hesitation in recommending her services to anyone in the same situation.

Simon Pett

Varian Medical Systems Inc.

Susan helped us tremendously to normalize and classify our spend for the first time

We started our spend classification project with Classification Guru, because we had disparate back-end systems and no consistency or visibility into our spend. Susan was wonderful to work with, because she had a lot of patience to work through information from many sources and in many languages. She helped us tremendously to normalize and classify our spend for the first time. We had quite a few edits and revisions and she was very attentive and fast getting them done. Today we have a much better understanding of our spend in the different regions where we operate and her help at making sense of the data was invaluable to us.

Alan Rice

Global Procurement