Every organisation wants to be data-driven, but when it comes to spend data, many businesses are still making high-stakes decisions based on incomplete, inconsistent, or unstructured information.
One of the most overlooked culprits? A lack of product and service classification, particularly through widely accepted taxonomies like UNSPSC.
If your spend data isn’t classified, it isn’t actionable. It’s a black hole of missed savings, supplier duplication, and reporting chaos.
The Pain of Poorly Structured Spend Data
Procurement and finance teams depend on accurate spend analysis to uncover savings, negotiate better contracts, and align sourcing strategy with business goals. But without proper classification, line items in your ERP or procurement system can’t be grouped, compared, or analyzed meaningfully.
Instead, you’re left with thousands of vague or conflicting descriptions:
- “Valve, ball-type” in one system and “Ball valve” in another
- “Cleaners – floor” vs. “Floor cleaning solutions”
- No visibility into how many of the same product types are being sourced from multiple vendors
The result? You’re flying blind.
- Duplicate suppliers go unnoticed
- Category-level reports are unreliable
- Sourcing teams can’t leverage volume discounts
- Stakeholders lose confidence in your data
Why Classification Matters, and Why UNSPSC Works
By classifying product and service records using the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code, businesses can group similar spend, compare vendors, and analyse patterns across divisions and geographies. Suddenly, fragmented data becomes a clear, unified view of organizational spend, ready for negotiation, consolidation, and cost control.
With UNSPSC, your procurement team can:
- Group and benchmark similar items
- Consolidate purchases across business units
- Identify maverick spend or pricing anomalies
- Power BI dashboards and AI tools with structured inputs
But achieving this manually is time-consuming, error-prone, and costly.
AICA’s Role in Unlocking Accurate Spend Intelligence
That’s where AICA comes in.
We specialise in automating UNSPSC classification using Agentic AI, purpose-built to cleanse, enrich, and classify product and service data with over 90% accuracy. Our platform helps procurement teams transform disconnected spend data into reliable, categorised insights at scale.
With AICA, organisations can:
- Cleanse historical procurement data for clarity and action
- Classify and enrich new items before they hit your system
- Standardise supplier data for accurate consolidation
- Build a reliable foundation for spend analytics, ESG reporting, and sourcing automation
Conclusion
Your spend data is only as valuable as its structure. Without proper classification, it tells you nothing. But with the right tools and the right taxonomy, it becomes a competitive advantage.
If your procurement team is still operating with unclassified or semi-structured data, it’s time to rethink. Let AICA help you turn raw data into real savings, fast.
Visit our website to learn how we power intelligent spend analysis through automated UNSPSC classification.
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