Patent Document ID: 20030120477
Application ID: 10279195
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. A method of managing a procurement process, comprising: storing a plurality of electronic contracts including unstructured textual data; determining one or more linguistic patterns associated with a variety of business parameters; generating linguistic rules based on the one or more linguistic patterns; using text mining tools to extract particular information regarding the variety of business parameters from the unstructured textual data using one or more of the linguistic rules; collecting procurement data from a plurality of data sources, the procurement data including information regarding a plurality of procurement events; wherein one or more of the data sources has an associated source-specific product catalog; storing a global catalog specifying, for each of a plurality of products, mapping relationships between source-specific product attributes specified by the one or more source-specific product catalogs and one or more generic attributes specified by the global catalog; automatically mapping the source-specific attributes associated with products identified by the collected procurement data to the corresponding generic attributes based on the mapping relationships; for each of a plurality of business divisions of a business entity, generating a set of spend formulas for determining spending associated with that business division; generating a set of supplier intelligence business rules regarding a procurement process, each supplier intelligence business rule interrelating at least one spend formula associated with a first one of the business divisions with at least one spend formula associated with a second one of the business divisions; automatically analyzing at least a portion of the procurement data based on one or more of the set of supplier intelligence business rules to determine the financial effects of a decision made by the first business division on the second business division; wherein the analysis includes identifying information regarding particular products based on the generic attributes associated with the one or more products.