Samification by The Classification Guru: Vendor Analysis — Supplier normalization solution overview, roadmap, competitors, user considerations, analyst summary

In this Spend Matters Vendor Analysis we provide an overview of Samification by The Classification Guru (TCG) and its solution for supplier normalization.

Dirty data is a problem that everyone is familiar with. Whether it is messy supplier or spend data or files nested in random Google Drives and Excel files, every company can identify a data source they’d like to have cleaned.

Many companies which do not use a formal spend analytics or supplier management tool simply keep track of their suppliers in Excel, but this easily becomes unwieldy and out of hand. And for more developed organizations — even companies that promise to help clean your data — often have a stopping point. For example, most analytics vendors classify between 80% and 95% of spend data, which can still leave hundreds of thousands of lines unclassified data. While this may not be a priority for some categories or industries, it is a vital miss for others.

Samification is a new tool built to help with this issue, one that is really a return to more traditional methods of supplier normalization. It is designed to normalize 100% of supplier data through a combination of rules and human intervention. It can be used by individual companies that do not have formal procurement tools and simply need help organizing internal CSV documents, or by companies just starting their spend analysis journey (or even by large vendors that struggle to classify the last 5%-20% of their client’s suppliers, where supplier normalization may assist with the process ).

This Vendor Analysis explores Samification's concept, application and supporting services. It gives a competitive market analysis and key analyst takeaways.

Here’s why Samification matters:

• To the market — Samification promises to normalize 100% of suppliers at an affordable price point. It is ideal for companies that are not ready to commit to a full tech product but need help organizing their CSV files. That being said, as it only normalizes suppliers and does not actually go on to analyze spend data, it could feasibly also be a tool service companies use in their customer projects.
• To potential buyers — While the tool itself is new, the Samification team is highly experienced and has been normalizing supplier data as a service for over 7 years. They have 200,000+ suppliers pre-normalized and add more every day.