ICG Commerce Expands Services Procurement Solutions
New Program and Technology Enhancements Reinforce Ability To Help Companies Manage Both Purchase and Execution of a Wide Range of Services
PHILADELPHIA - Tuesday, November 02, 2004 - ICG Commerce, a leading procurement services provider, today
announced enhancements to its services procurement offering, including new category management programs and
technology improvements designed to help companies further capitalize on untapped savings opportunities in service-related
buying categories.
The latest research on the subject from the Center for Advanced Purchasing Studies (CAPS) shows that services
represent nearly a third of companies' overall spend, yet few organizations manage this area of procurement as
effectively as they would like to. Three-quarters of CAPS survey respondents describe purchasing and managing the
delivery of services as either "difficult" or "very difficult" as compared to goods.
To address the market's need for greater control over services spend, ICG Commerce integrates deep category
expertise with leading technology to help companies more effectively manage key buying categories such as labor,
marketing services, facilities management, telecommunications services, and travel. The company's dedicated team of
experts leverages category specific technology to help companies perform sourcing, day-to-day transaction
management and category and vendor management services (VMS) that yield ongoing cost and performance
improvements.
ICG Commerce's services eProcurement platform, allows companies to efficiently process transactions from a single
interface, for many different types of services or payment structures – time-based, volume-based, project-based, fixed-
price, contingency, retained, milestone and activity-based. ICG Commerce has enhanced its services procurement
technology to allow "universal" requisitions to be established with activity-based rates. As service providers record
which activities are performed, the system automatically applies the correct rate for each activity on bills and invoices,
greatly reducing errors and time-consuming reconciliation activities. This new functionality can be broadly applied to
many labor related service categories, including repair, installation, IT contracting, consulting, light industrial, training
and others.
"Enterprise spending on services – ranging from temporary workers and consultants to marketing, legal and facilities
management – represents a large but largely unmanaged proportion of enterprise spending," stated Andrew Bartels,
Forrester Research Industry Economics and Data vice president in a report published earlier this year. "Standard
eProcurement applications don't help because they only focus on the initial buying and not on the day-to-day
management of services against a contract."
In addition to offering enhanced technology, ICG Commerce is also now providing ongoing Vendor Management
Services (VMS) to support the day-to-day fulfillment and management of contingent labor related purchases. ICG
Commerce experts leverage the RealExchange for Services technology to process temporary staff requisitions, ensure
timely fulfillment of temporary staff orders and timecard approvals and provide ongoing user support and issue
resolution.
The comprehensive and integrated model for services procurement has proven so effective that a number of companies
including AVAYA, Vought Industries and QualxServ have engaged ICG Commerce to fully manage select service
categories. Earlier this year, ICG Commerce was named a finalist in the Outsourcing Center's highly competitive
Outsourcing Excellence Awards for its labor services procurement work on behalf of customer QualxServ.
"Companies that have initiated procurement improvement programs are expanding these programs to include services
categories in order to deliver an even greater impact to the bottom-line," said Danny Ezrol, ICG Commerce's director
of services sourcing and category management. "Having implemented services procurement programs for some of the
world's leading companies over the past several years, it is clear that the proper balance of category sourcing expertise,
technology and ongoing support can yield tremendous benefits in terms of impact to the bottom line as well as the
ultimate quality of service received."
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About ICG Commerce, Inc.
ICG Commerce is a leading Procurement Services Provider exclusively focused on helping companies buy more
effectively and efficiently in order to reduce costs significantly and continuously. The company offers an unmatched
combination of process and category expertise and hosted technology to deliver Sourcing, Purchase-to-Pay Automation
and Outsourcing Services. ICG Commerce Inc., a privately held company founded in 1992, is a member of Internet
Capital Group's (Nasdaq: ICGE) network of partner companies and has been honored as one of Forbes' 'Best of the
Web: B2B', UPSIDE Magazine's 'Hot 100' and as an iSource 100 company.
Contacts:
Kristen Knouft
ICG Commerce
484-690-5000
kknouft@icgcommerce.com
Brittany Morris
Ruder-Finn
312-329-3983
morrisb@ruderfinn.com
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