SUPPLY CHAIN
that reflect the cleansing that the category managers did last time , and so they don ’ t have to do it again . You can see there ’ s a shift there from the cleansing , even the analytical work , to leveraging it and using it .” Ambrose believes that there is now an opportunity to begin to build in technology – and automation in particular – when designing new procurement tools and systems .
Giving the example of building a new vendor into master vendor list , he says : “ We currently have a workflow process that goes through various approvals , and we have to collect a significant amount of data for that vendor for legal and regulatory purposes as well as a sourcing and category strategy purposes . A lot of this information is public and we have the opportunity to use AI to collect it for us .
“ We can collect that information in , which not only speeds the transaction , but also probably provides more data than we could get on that supplier , that we can feedback into spend analytics and help our sourcing managers do their jobs .
“ We have the opportunity to be really creative about thinking how we use suppliers in our environment , either to ease the transactions or provide information or identify a risk , or be proactive , such as recognising when a supplier is struggling and how can we help , or being able to identify whether one of our competitors has just signed a deal with them . It ’ s a really exciting time .”
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