The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated procurement team’s day-to-day work, putting emphasis on the requirement of modernization and transformation in supply chains. Using advanced technology, we can now leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to revolutionize procurement practices.
AI today is a commonly used technology than it was a couple decades ago. From Amazon Alexa to map navigation and facial recognition, it’s consistently used in our day-to-day lives.
While other industries have benefitted from its potential for some time now, AI in procurement is an evolving topic, with great benefits. Procurement teams need quality insights to better predict what’s coming, and AI is the perfect catalyst to speed up that process. Tapping into the power of AI and training it to do tedious tasks, frees up the time for professionals to focus on much strategic actions. Industry leaders are revolutionizing their teams with AI and making big strides in their procurement divisions. Learn how you can too.
How can AI help procurement teams?
Human-guided AI helps procurement teams resolve complex problems efficiently. Whether it’s tasks like spend intelligence, sourcing and or predicting supply chain factors, integrating AI into your software program will make processes faster and accurate. This means self-learning software will save time, cut costs, and reduce errors.
According to Gartner, “50% of all legacy spend analysis software will be retired; replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered, cloud-based solutions.”
Incorporating AI into your system frees you from time-consuming tasks and empowers you to focus on more significant matters. So, how can you have better data management to manage costs, predict supply, and market risks? Let’s look at how we can apply AI in these practices.
Three Ways AI Helps Procurement
1. Supplier Sustainability and Innovation
– Rising sustainability efforts across the world have resulted in industries making active changes to comply with new standards and guidelines. Big chunks of an organization’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) footprint lies with who their suppliers are. Organizations are meeting this call to action incorporating them into their goods, services, utilities while still optimizing monetary gains for their businesses’ life cycle.
They do this by leveraging the power of AI. This allows businesses to narrow down their supply chain choices to the best criteria fits.
One example of AI improving procurement process include finding collaborative shipping options for businesses, where software is trained to identify shipping data, helping businesses cut costs by collaborating with transporting companies, whilst reducing the strain on the environment.
2. Supply Chain Risk
Risk managers and teams spend massive amounts of time on analyzing and predicting market risks.
In 2020 and 2021, we saw a significant strain across the global inter-connected supply chains. Merging AI with data analytics and the knowledge procurement experts have, can cut down those long periods of time spent on the ample amounts of data, slimming down on errors, and leaving risk teams with more time to make better risk analysis and market predictions.
3. Spend Categorization
Procurement teams need to manage their spend – both direct and indirect. With thousands of transactions happening daily, it is challenging for humans to analyze the historical trends from spend data. The appropriate utilization and integration of spend data using AI can enable procurement practitioners to make sound sourcing decisions.
Over a period of three years, Evalueserve helped an oil and gas company facing knowledge management challenges to organize thousands of documents with expert-guided supplier and category intelligence. By resolving these bottlenecks with the help of our experts, the company saw 50% savings with improvised supplier contracts and a 40% increase in effectiveness by streamlining document resourcing.
Companies can make significant strides by integrating AI in their procurement programs.
If you’ve read this far, take the next steps to revolutionize your procurement needs and team with AI. Ask yourself what processes you currently hold and will benefit from it, ranging from ESG, spending to risk, AI gives you the competitive edge you need in today’s market.
Get started today by speaking to an expert, visit https://www.evalueserve.com/speak-to-expert/
