UC Systemwide Procurement wrapped up a major data upgrade in March 2025: the Spend Classification Improvement (SCI) project. Led by the Information, Analytics & Systems (IAS) team, in collaboration with Strategic Sourcing COEs (SSCOEs), and supported by GEP (our source-to-contract technology platform provider), the project tackled longstanding issues in how procurement data is categorized in CalUsource.
This was the first large-scale effort to review and refine how campus procurement spend is categorized in CalUsource. With taxonomy and business rules established in 2017, evolving business practices since have led to increased concerns about spend misclassification.
Why does it matter? Accurate spend data is critical for smarter sourcing, forecasting and portfolio planning, and confident decision-making. This project reclassified more than $1 billion in spend across 6.7 million records, correcting outdated or inconsistent categories that made reporting and analysis difficult. (Updated Analytics Resources for reference.)
Project highlights include:
- $14M in IT spend was correctly recategorized in a pilot with the IT sourcing team—showing just how much value targeted fixes can deliver.
- A monthly spend data refresh calendar that now lives on the Procurement Portal and has hit 100% on-time delivery since June 2024.
- New tools and workflows were put in place to collect feedback, streamline data issues resolution, and keep classification efforts moving forward.
Responsibility for ongoing maintenance has now transitioned to the IAS team. Outstanding issues, like taxonomy changes, data files revisits, and data structure updates, have been transitioned into the Spend Analytics Foundation Program, which will further enhance spend data quality through taxonomy refinement and campus file reviews.
These outcomes highlight how strengthening data integrity through continued collaboration between IAS, SSCOEs, and our third-party classification provider (GEP) remains critical to our procurement transformation, along with investment in process and tool enhancement.
The SCI project is a strong example of how dedication to continuous improvement and collaboration across teams—with a willingness to dig deep into the data—can drive better outcomes for UC.