About five years ago, during the golden age of Big Data, I was an executive at two real estate technology companies Market Leader & Trulia. All the information we needed existed within the walls of the company, but accessing and analyzing that data was another matter. There were too many enterprise systems, and too few of the IT and financial resources needed to make sense of the jumble of raw information. The solution to this gap is AI-Driven Intelligence Platforms.
When an executive wanted a report, we submitted a request to a queue managed by IT. Then we waited. When the report was finally delivered, the data still had to be cleansed and analyzed to produce recommendations on next steps. This was infinitely better than making a decision with no information at all, but it meant that any informed, data-driven decision required an enormous amount of time, resources and patience.
In the fall of 2016, my Suplari co-founder and current CTO Jeff Gerber approached me with a simple solution. Enterprises generated enormous volumes of data related to purchasing such as contracts, spend, PO’s, invoices, and product usage. That kind of information had the potential to help companies save money, avoid risk, and make more informed decisions. Yet, the data was either trapped in the pages of a paper contract or invoice, or buried within mountains of data in a siloed enterprise application. This seemed like an ideal application of AI-Driven Intelligence Platforms for Procurement and Finance.
If large organizations want to match spend with contractual terms, they either manually comb through spend, contract, and invoice data one line item at a time or outsource that work to another company that does it for them. Talk about inefficient!
Plus, there were no additional business insights. Integrating and normalizing the data was a time-consuming, error-prone, manual process both for IT and finance. Once you had the data, it still had to be analyzed to produce a strategic recommendation. Jeff thought that there should be a better way.
That simple idea of applying AI-Driven solutions to Procurement and Finance was the genesis behind the Suplari Intelligence platform.
Suplari Intelligence is an intelligent application that sits on top of your existing financial and procurement systems. Our platform moves the core data from those systems to the cloud. Then, using Artificial Intelligence, it constantly normalizes and analyzes the procurement and finance data, searching for opportunities to increase profit, reduce spend, mitigate risk, ensure compliance, streamline processes, improve visibility and enhance team productivity.
Here’s what Suplari does better than anyone else in the industry:
1. Augment
Suplari moves the data related to purchasing (such as contracts, payables, T&E, corporate card, PO’s, invoices, preferred supplier data, and usage data) to the cloud, then integrates it into the Suplari Unified Data Model. Suplari’s AI algorithms clean, normalize, categorize and enhance the data by combining it with other data sets that are essential to making informed decisions, including supplier details, news, cybersecurity, parent child hierarchies, diversity, and corporate social responsibility to name a few. By connecting relevant data points from disparate applications, Suplari actually makes your data better than it was originally.
2. Analyze
Say goodbye to pivot tables! Suplari provides a best-in-class, modern analytics and BI tool, empowering everyone in your organization with the insights they need to reduce spend and mitigate risk.
3. Automate
Suplari Intelligence constantly monitors, analyzes, and scores your spend, your suppliers and your contracts, searching for new opportunities to reduce spend, reduce risk, or increase compliance to policy.
Suplari’s data science team is constantly adding to its library of AI-driven algorithms to provide insights into both strategic opportunities like supplier consolidation, as well as transactional opportunities like duplicate spend and outlier transactions.
The Launch of Spend Intelligence and Contract Intelligence
By applying AI to procurement and finance, Suplari is driving a major shift in how enterprises manage and analyze financial and customer data. A few weeks ago we launched two additional products that leverage the Suplari Intelligence Platform:
Spend Intelligence
Spend intelligence is focused on identifying opportunities to increase profit and reduce spend by accessing spend-related data in sources like Accounts Payable, Travel and Expense (T&E) and P-card / Corporate Card data. By leveraging external data sources, Spend Intelligence provides additional insights about your suppliers.
Subscribers to this service receive a best-in-class BI and analytics tool set, as well as access to a growing library of AI-driven insights that help you identify additional opportunities to reduce spend.
Contract Intelligence
Contract Intelligence normalizes data from your contract lifecycle management system with your spend and supplier data, giving you full visibility into the intersection of contractual terms and supplier behavior. With Contract Intelligence, sourcing and procurement teams can be in a better position to negotiate supplier agreements, reduce costs, and bring more spend under management.
Just like Spend Intelligence, subscribers to Contract Intelligence gain access to an ever-growing library of insights related to contracts.
One of the most exciting aspects of Contract Intelligence is its ability to scan all the contract data in your CLM, normalize it with your supplier data, then highlight the ideal time to renegotiate a contract based on the supplier’s fiscal year end.
To see a live demo of how Suplari is applying AI to procurement and finance through the Suplari Intelligence platform using your own data, contact Suplari at info@suplari.com.
