On-demand supply chain management provider Procuri Inc. has acquired TrueSource Inc., a purveyor of spend management application services and a Procuri partner for the past year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition, announced at Procuri's Empower 2006 conference in Atlanta earlier this week, brings in-house the spend management product that TrueSource developed and Procuri has been selling for the past year under the TotalAnalytics rubric.

"There was always an option -- do we build or buy?" said Tim Minahan, senior vice president of marketing for Procuri, in an interview with Managing Automation. "We definitely had to have [spend management] in our suite, and then I think it got to a point where we realized we really needed to own it as well."

The original partnership with TrueSource, initiated in 2005, helped fill out the functionality of Procuri's suite of supplier management products, and also afforded it time to integrate TrueSource's functionality with its products in advance of the purchase agreement, although Minahan said the partnership was not necessarily established with acquisition in mind.

The TrueSource product that Procuri gains, which will continue to be known as TotalAnalytics, helps a company manage and analyze its spending with a host of suppliers and across myriad functional areas.

"Most companies have a largely heterogeneous application environment," Minahan noted -- systems scattered across operational sites or business departments that run the gamut from Oracle's latest ERP offering, for instance, to legacy systems that are a decade old. The TrueSource product, he said, extracts data from the various systems of record, optimizes and organizes the data, and describes the resulting picture of the company's spending habits.

The product includes an auto-classification engine that relies on 120,000 preset rules to "cleanse" data that may be incomplete or inaccurate. Those rules can determine, for instance, whether the abbreviation "blk" stands for black or bulk, depending on the context in which it occurs.

While the analytical tool organizes a company's existing supply network, evaluation of potential suppliers against information such as financial viability and diversity status, Minahan noted, is possible through one of Procuri's existing products, called Total Supplier.

Procuri's acquisition of TrueSource, along with several recent partnership announcements, represents an effort to expand its product capabilities to offer a more complete supplier management solution.