A search for the associated production of a top quark and a Z boson (tZq), as predicted by theory was performed with the full CMS data set collected at 8TeV. In order to enhance the separation between signal and background processes, a multivariate discriminator is used in both the tZq-SM and FCNC searches. A range of different quantities are used as input variables for the BDTs. They are selected based on their discriminating power and include kinematic variables related to the top quark and the Z boson The BDTs are trained using half of the simulated samples for these processes and they are trained separately for each channel.