Award-Winning Reed Elsevier. Team Relies on LexisNexis

Transcription

1 Case Study LexisNexis Business Insight Solutions Global Procurement Award-Winning Reed Elsevier Global Procurement Team Relies on LexisNexis Publisher to Track News Reports about Suppliers. LexisNexis Publisher Overview Location: Worldwide (principal corporate offices in New York, London and Amsterdam). Industry: Business Information. Customer Profile: Reed Elsevier is a world-leading provider of professional information solutions in the Science, Medical, Risk, Legal and Business sectors. The company s customers use its products every day to advance science, improve medical outcomes, evaluate risk, enable better legal decisions, forge business relationships and gain business insight. Business Situation: In 2008, Reed Elsevier s new Chief Procurement Officer began a transformation of the global procurement operations, a piece of which called for the development of better market intelligence to assess its supplier relationships. This came into sharper focus as a recession continued to pressure Reed Elsevier to reduce costs and when the procurement office began dealing with the uncertainty of whether some of its suppliers would weather the storm. Solution: After exploring a variety of business information products in the marketplace, Reed Elsevier tested a product from one of its divisions, LexisNexis, called LexisNexis Publisher. The procurement team was impressed by the comprehensive sources of news and information in the database and was also struck by the powerful tools built into LexisNexis Publisher. They decided to deploy the product to provide supply chain research for their global procurement operations. Results: Early warning of potential problems with suppliers More comprehensive content than accessible from open-web searches Dissemination of information through multiple platforms Raising of awareness among procurement staff to utilize all resources available Product Summary: Research Solutions LexisNexis Publisher Reed Elsevier is a world-leading provider of professional information solutions in the Science, Medical, Risk, Legal and Business sectors. The company s customers use its products every day to advance science, improve medical outcomes, evaluate risk, enable better legal decisions, forge business relationships and gain business insight. Reed Elsevier s principal businesses include: Elsevier, the world s leading provider of scientific and medical information; LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a provider of data and analytics that enable its customers to manage risks associated with transactions; LexisNexis Legal & Professional, a global provider of legal, tax, regulatory, news and business information to customers in more than 100 countries; Reed Exhibitions, the world s leading events organizer that hosts more than 460 events in 36 countries; and Reed Business Information, a leading provider of business information, online data and marketing solutions, featuring more than 200 premier business magazines. Situation In 2008, Reed Elsevier appointed a new Chief Procurement Officer Leslie Campbell who quickly began a transformation of the company s global procurement operations. One piece of this transformation was to develop better market intelligence with which to assess supplier relationships. One of the key strategic objectives in our procurement operation is to reduce risk to the company even while we re trying to reduce costs, said Campbell. We knew that we needed some important tools in order to have our hands on actionable data as we assessed our supplier relationships. When the economic downturn of the late-2000s really kicked in, we found ourselves dealing with the uncertainty of whether some of our suppliers would weather the storm, said Eric Walsworth, Director of Programs and Tools for Reed Elsevier Global Procurement. This created strains in our global supply chain, so we began exploring ideas for making some changes in the way we monitored our suppliers in order to try to identify potential business disruptions before they occurred.

2 Specifically, we were really impressed by the ability to configure the product to focus on negative news reports about individual suppliers we wanted to track. Lisa Bowling, Senior Vice President Reed Elsevier Global Procurement Solution After exploring a variety of business information products in the marketplace, Reed Elsevier tested a product from one of its divisions, LexisNexis, called LexisNexis Publisher. LexisNexis Publisher gives business executives access to the information they need to act faster and make better decisions. LexisNexis Publisher has access to 22,000+ news and social media sources, 600+ company & industry sources and 300+ executive and biographical sources no other competitor comes close to this collection and includes relevant information from the world s foremost news sources, such as: The New York Times USA Today The Washington Post Forbes Fast Company Harvard Business Review Unlike other providers, LexisNexis doesn t rely on free content from the open Web. Publishers worldwide license their content directly to LexisNexis, which allows the company to provide LexisNexis Publisher customers with access to full-text premium publications not available via the Internet. In addition, LexisNexis maintains the archives, so full-text information stays available without interruption or redirect. In addition to monitoring individual suppliers, procurement professionals can use LexisNexis Publisher to gain perspective on supplier categories such as electronics, IT, metals, paper/packaging, plastics, transportation, etc. This enables them to better assess market trends, cost drivers and other industry developments. We were struck by the comprehensive sources of news and information in the database and the powerful tools built into LexisNexis Publisher, said Lisa Bowling, Senior Vice President at Reed Elsevier Global Procurement. Specifically, we were really impressed by the ability to configure the product to focus on negative news reports about individual suppliers we wanted to track. After a successful product test, Reed Elsevier decided to deploy LexisNexis Publisher to provide supply chain research for their global procurement operations.

3 This has allowed us to make more informed procurement decisions and to move quickly on possible problems coming down the road. Eric Walsworth, Director of Programs and Tools Reed Elsevier Global Procurement. Results Early warning of potential problems with suppliers Since deploying LexisNexis Publisher, we ve been able to get a jumpstart on important information about suppliers and potential suppliers in our global supply chain, said Walsworth. This has allowed us to make more informed procurement decisions and to move quickly on possible problems coming down the road. Walsworth cited one anecdote in which LexisNexis Publisher identified news coverage that indicated a looming problem with one of the company s top suppliers in Europe, information that wasn t even made public to corporate customers for another full week. By the time the supplier began notifying customers, Reed Elsevier had already mitigated the situation and was able to tell the supplier yes, we know when they contacted them about the problem. In another example, LexisNexis Publisher turned up important legal information about a potential technology vendor right in the middle of an RFP for the Reed Elsevier contract. This market intelligence enabled the company to make a better-informed decision about the vendor they selected for the contract. More comprehensive content than available from open-web searches Open-Web searches can be useful for some business research, but it s just not adequate for the specific negative news supply chain research we needed, said Walsworth. If a procurement office doesn t target their news research to known and tested negative search criteria, you re likely to be inundated with data, but not with actionable information. Dissemination of information through multiple platforms LexisNexis Publisher provides users with the ability to provide access to current news information to their business colleagues through the delivery platform of their choice, including daily newsletter, transmission or intranet update. No matter the business-critical topics customers/ prospects, industry developments, M&A, financials and competitors users can create effective channels that filter and deliver the information they need to have. They can also add intelligence from internal documents and other Web resources in order to compile one, unified package that saves valuable reading time and promotes quick comprehension and then deliver RSS feeds into a business intelligence/analytic dashboard (e.g., Ariba, Emptoris, Iasta, Salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP, etc.), intranets or portals (e.g., SharePoint ), allowing procurement professionals to monitor the latest news on key vendors for signs of risk or supply chain disruption.

4 Raising of awareness among procurement staff to utilize all resources available An interesting and unexpected side benefit we have realized by deploying LexisNexis Publisher is that it has raised the consciousness of our procurement staff members to make sure we re all utilizing all resources at our disposal in order to make the best possible decisions, said Bowling. The mere fact that LexisNexis Publisher has assisted us with the transformation of our procurement operations has demonstrated to all of us that we need to be embracing any and all tools we can in order to improve our risk management and supply chain decision making. Although its transformation is ongoing, the work being done at Reed Elsevier has not gone unnoticed. The Reed Elsevier Global Procurement team was recently awarded the prestigious Best Procurement Team recognition by the Procurement Leaders Network, a global organization of the corporate world s best procurement teams. The Reed Elsevier team was nominated along with well-known corporate teams around the world, including the procurement groups from companies such as Coca-Cola, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Unilever. It s very gratifying to be recognized for the work we ve achieved so far, but we have ambitious plans for extending our efforts to obtain actionable data that will guide our supply management, said Walsworth. This will include the rollout of two more LexisNexis business research tools, Nexis Direct and LexisNexis Due Diligence Dashboard. We hope to build on the early success of our deployment of LexisNexis Publisher with the use of these products in the coming months. Reed Elsevier continues to work with LexisNexis and is now taking the next step to pro-actively manage supplier risk by working with the LexisNexis Publisher team on the development of tools for deeper industry and supplier reporting.

5 About LexisNexis LexisNexis ( is a leading global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions designed specifically for professionals in the legal, risk management, corporate, government, law enforcement, accounting, and academic markets. LexisNexis originally pioneered online information with its Lexis and Nexis services. A member of Reed Elsevier [NYSE: ENL; NYSE: RUK] ( LexisNexis serves customers in more than 100 countries with 15,000 employees worldwide. The opinions expressed within this case study represent customer opinions. LexisNexis believes this case study experience generally represents the experience found with other similar customer situations. However, each customer will have its own subjective goals and requirements and will subscribe to different combinations of LexisNexis services to suit those specific goals and requirements. This case study may not be deemed to create any warranty or representation that any other customer s experience will be the same as the experience identified herein. LexisNexis uses the customer s trademarks herein with the customer s permission. LexisNexis, Lexis, Nexis and the Knowledge Burst logo are registered trademarks of Reed Elsevier Properties Inc., used under license. Reed Elsevier is a registered trademark of Elsevier Properties SA. Reed Exhibitions is a registered trademark of Reed Elsevier Group plc. Reed Business Information is a registered trademark of Reed Elsevier Inc. Other products or services may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies LexisNexis. All rights reserved. NBI