At last week’s Western Region SIGnature (Sourcing Industry Group) Event, I spoke to sourcing and procurement professionals here in greater Seattle. As usual, AI was a hot conversation topic, but the focus of the discussion has evolved. A few years ago, when people were just beginning to explore AI, conversations began with “What can AI do for my organization?”
Today the discussion has shifted.
Many of the procurement leaders at the event were convinced of the value of AI. They knew that the data housed in their disconnected systems was obscuring opportunities to save and mitigate risks. Yet many were still hesitant to launch an AI initiative. How do you know when your organization is ready? Here are a few signs that it’s time to make a change.
It’s time to start building an AI-powered procurement organization when…
- Your team spends far too much time on data cleansing and normalization – leaving them with little time to make strategic contributions to the business.
- Your procurement organization is frustrated with the capacity of their current toolset to provide visibility into supplier relationships.
- Reports are generated with using home-grown processes and manually created reports – leading to frequent errors.
- Siloed applications and inconsistent data mask opportunities to reduce spend.
- Your procurement team struggles to manage a small percentage of suppliers – leaving the majority unmanaged.
- You grade supplier performance based on the most readily available information, which you suspect isn’t always accurate, and at best, doesn’t provide a complete picture of performance.
Intelligent Spend Management
To maximize supplier value, you need a comprehensive view of every element that influences spend and performance. Suplari’s Intelligent Spend Management solution makes use of AI and Machine Learning to identify risks and opportunities, evaluate the options and take corrective action.
How it works
Suplari’s AI-powered solution can capture data from a variety of legacy systems – from contract management applications to financial systems. This data is then automatically normalized, categorized and tagged. Unifying contractual with transactional data allows us to do several things. It makes it easy to compare actual spend to the spend under contract. Similarities in the data help identify new opportunities to aggregate demand and consolidate suppliers. While anomalies such as outlier transactions might be an early sign of a significant risk. On the other hand, it might just mean you have a fast-growing supplier.
Here are a few of the innovations provided by our Intelligent Spend Management System:
- Easy to use dashboards provide clear visibility into spend.
- Customized insight applications help users to identify issues, make decisions and take action proactively.
- Automatic tracking of optimization opportunities means that teams can spend less time searching for savings and more time generating real value.
As you begin to adopt AI, you’ll see an immediate improvement in reporting capabilities. In time, you’ll develop new processes to take advantage of the insights, and your organization can make more strategic contributions to the business.
To learn more about Intelligent Spend Management, click here https://suplari.com/demo/.
