SupplyChain Magazine March 2018 | Page 41

our customers or their stakeholders ,” explains Saric . “ Our network is truly open – we don ’ t charge fees to suppliers and we don ’ t place limits on a customer ’ s volume where many of our competitors enforce caps or coverage charges .”
Saric maintains it ’ s about more than merely digitising documents now more than 1mn suppliers connect with a world of commerce through Ivalua . “ It ’ s a true collaboration platform where businesses can define workflow and enable processes and include suppliers and other third parties in their approaches to add value , improve performance and take cost out of the overall supply chain . Our customers can evaluate suppliers with score cards to gather information , ultimately inspiring high adoption and collaboration and avoiding a conflicting relationship between buyers and suppliers .
To achieve this level of adoption , Ivalua is investing over 10 % of its R & D budget in AI to enhance digital enablement of cloud-based spend management through its Add-On Store . “ Machine learning is a big focus for a range of applications with our services for stakeholders including consumerised purchasing , valued buying and chat bot support for suppliers ,” says Saric . “ We ’ re focused on providing actionable insight and presenting it to the users at the right point of the process . There ’ s so much information captured through these platforms , but actually mining real insight to find where there ’ s a missed
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