PRODUCT CLASSIFICATION IN PROCUREMENT SYSTEMS

• US 20110087626A1
• Filed: 04/26/2010
• Published: 04/14/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 10/10/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Oracle International Corporation (Oracle Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Oracle International Corporation (Oracle Corporation)
• Inventors: Yeleshwarapu, Chandra, Rangarajan, Keshava, Pathak, Ashish, Ram, Munagala Kodanda, Srinivasan, Nagaraj, Bismpigiannis, Athanasios, Agarwal, Sudeep
• Granted Patent: US 8,768,930 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 706/12
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/087 Inventory or stock management, e.g. order filling, procurement or balancing against orders
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0641 Shopping interfaces

Abstract

Various embodiments provide solutions to assist in the classification of products in a procurement system. The tools provided by various embodiments include, without limitation, methods, systems, and/or software products. Merely by way of example, a method might comprise one or more procedures, any or all of which are executed by a computer system. Correspondingly, an embodiment might provide a computer system configured with instructions to perform one or more procedures in accordance with methods provided by various other embodiments. Similarly, a computer program might comprise a set of instructions that are executable by a computer system (and/or a processor therein) to perform such operations. In many cases, such software programs are encoded on physical and/or tangible computer readable media (such as, to name but a few examples, optical media, magnetic media, and/or the like).

Claims

1. In a procurement system implemented by an enterprise application, a method of assisting a user in classifying a product, the method comprising:

providing, from the procurement system, a user interface for receiving input from a user;

obtaining product information at the procurement system about a product the user desires to procure;

generating one or more keywords based on the product information, the keywords relating to possible classifications for the product;

determining a confidence level associated with each of the one or more keywords;

comparing the confidence level of each keyword with a specified threshold;

sending at least one of the one or more keywords to a classification engine, based on a comparison of the confidence level for each keyword with the threshold;

generating one or more predicted classifications at the classification engine;

presenting the one or more predicted classifications to the user, with the user interface; and

receiving, at the user interface, a selection of one of the predicted classifications;

classifying the product, based at least in part on the selection.

2. An apparatus, comprising:

a computer readable medium having encoded thereon a set of instructions executable by one or more computers to perform one or more operations, the set of instructions comprising;

instructions for providing a user interface for receiving input from a user;

instructions for obtaining product information about a product the user desires to procure;

instructions for generating one or more keywords based on the product information, the keywords relating to possible classifications for the product;

instructions for instructions for sending at least one of the one or more keywords to a classification engine;

instructions for generating one or more predicted classifications at the classification engine;

instructions for presenting the one or more predicted classifications to the user, with the user interface;

instructions for receiving, at the user interface, a selection of one of the predicted classifications; and

instructions for classifying the product, based at least in part on the selection.

3. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the set of instructions is incorporated within an enterprise procurement application.

4. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the instructions for obtaining product information comprise:

instructions for obtaining product information from the user, via the user interface.

5. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the instructions for obtaining product information comprise:

instructions for obtaining product information from an online catalog.

6. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the instructions for obtaining product information comprise:

instructions for obtaining product information from a punchout to a website operated by a supplier of the product.

7. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the instructions for obtaining product information comprise:

instructions for obtaining data from a plurality of data sources.

8. The apparatus of claim 7, wherein the set of instructions further comprises:

instructions for normalizing the data from the plurality of data sources.

9. The apparatus of claim 7, wherein the instructions for generating one or more keywords comprise:

instructions for generating a result set from the data from a plurality of data sources, wherein the result set comprises the product information about the product the user desires to procure.

10. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the set of instructions further comprises:

instructions for presenting the one or more generated keywords to the user, via the user interface; and

instructions for receiving, via the user interface, a selection of one or more keywords;

wherein instructions for sending the at least one keyword to the classification engine comprise instructions for sending the one or more selected keywords to the classification engine.

11. The apparatus of claim 10, wherein the one or more keywords are a plurality of keywords, the set of instructions further comprising:

instructions for clustering the plurality of keywords into two or more sets of keywords, to group similar keywords together;

wherein the instructions for presenting the one or more generated keywords to the user comprise instructions to present the clustered sets of keywords to the user.

12. The apparatus of claim 10, wherein the instructions for generating one or more predicted classifications comprise instructions for generating one or more predicted classifications based on an ontology, and wherein the set of instructions further comprises:

instructions for updating the ontology based on the one or more keywords selected by the user and the predicted classification selected by the user, to correlate the selected one or more keywords with the selected predicted classification.

13. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the set of instructions further comprises:

instructions for determining a confidence level associated with each of the one or more keywords; and

instructions for comparing the confidence levels with a specified threshold.

14. The apparatus of claim 13, wherein the instructions for sending at least one of the one or more keywords to a classification engine comprise:

instructions for sending at least one of the one or more keywords to a classification engine, based on a comparison of the confidence levels with the threshold.

15. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the set of instructions further comprises:

instructions for maintaining a hierarchical classification taxonomy, comprising multiple classification levels.

16. The apparatus of claim 15, wherein the one or more predicted classifications reside at a first level of the hierarchical classification taxonomy, the set of instructions further comprising:

instructions for generating one or more predicted classifications at a second level of the hierarchical classification taxonomy, based on the one or more keywords, wherein the second level of the hierarchical classification taxonomy is subordinate to the first level of the hierarchical classification taxonomy.

17. The apparatus of claim 16, wherein the one or more predicted classifications at the second level of the hierarchical classification taxonomy are subclassifications of the classification selected by the user.

18. The apparatus of claim 16, wherein the set of instructions further comprises:

instructions for receiving, at the user interface, a selection of one of the predicted classifications at the second level of the classification taxonomy; and

instructions for classifying the product, based at least in part on the selection of the predicted classification at the second level of the classification taxonomy.

19. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the set of instructions further comprises:

instructions for rating each of the one or more predicted classifications, based on a predicted fit between each predicted classification and the product;

wherein the instructions for presenting the one or more predicted classifications to the user comprise instructions for presenting rating information about each of the predicted classifications.

20. A computer system, comprising:

one or more processors; and

a computer readable medium in communication with the one or more processors, the computer readable medium having encoded thereon a set of instructions executable by the computer system to perform one or more operations, the set on instructions comprising;

instructions for providing a user interface for receiving input from a user;

instructions for obtaining product information about a product the user desires to procure;

instructions for generating one or more keywords based on the product information, the keywords relating to possible classifications for the product;

instructions for instructions for sending at least one of the one or more keywords to a classification engine;

instructions for generating one or more predicted classifications at the classification engine;

instructions for presenting the one or more predicted classifications to the user, with the user interface;

instructions for receiving, at the user interface, a selection of one of the predicted classifications; and

instructions for classifying the product, based at least in part on the selection.