Enhanced Productivity. Increase Compliance – The next phase of Procurement

Times have changed. So have the buying trends in B2B businesses. Procurement is not a stand-alone function anymore, it requires an integration of multiple departments.

Though the advent of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning has opened up an array of opportunities for revolutionizing procurement, there is no single solution that fits every enterprise alike. A solution customized to the needs of the modern buyer is what drives value for the business. The key to procurement effectiveness is adopting the right strategy that complements legacy procurement systems.

For a large American Pharma & CPG Manufacturer, multiple complex internal systems and processes led to low adoption rate and high maverick spend. Their big support staff required over 200 call centers. The company was facing high cost of systems overhead. Full AI adoption was not possible as almost 83% of its business processes was not standardized.

XtractEdge Guided Buying helped enable self-service and increased system adoption due to its simple and intuitive user interface. XtractEdge Guided Buying doesn’t require a separate system or implementation load. The XtractEdge powered Business App was integrated with multiple systems including SAP Ariba to standardize processes. Thus, it helped increase catalogue adoption from 35% to 77%. The catalogue content was enabled in 100+ sub-categories. Implementation of XtractEdge Guided Buying reduced maverick spend and transactional cycle time, improved productivity and increased compliance.

In the ever-evolving world of procurement, where the thrust is increasingly on improving user’s buying experience, traditional procurement processes lack the ability and agility to engage the new and reformed B2B buyer. The traditional processes are time-taking and involve lengthy approval processes and payment cycles. They also demand interaction with multiple stakeholders and managing multiple systems and data. This leads to higher inefficiencies and high transaction costs.

This is where XtractEdge Guided Buying comes to rescue. It is an application akin to a personal assistant for online shopping, but for the business buyer. It sits neatly atop existing e-procurement systems, even on legacy systems that have been running for decades. It utilizes AI and Machine Learning to assist buyers by intelligently routing product and service requests to appropriate buying channels and preferred suppliers, ensuring compliance with organizational policies while generating savings. XtractEdge Guided Buying eliminates the need for the users to go through multiple systems for their procurement requests, while at the same time enabling purchase from the preferred suppliers as well as minimizing policy violations and human errors.

The application intelligently recommends products based on historical buying patterns while consolidating spend across top suppliers. It captures requests from multiple channels with intuitive category-specific templates and forms. It automatically identifies product specifications and appropriate suppliers and highlights pricing discrepancies enabling smarter buying decisions.

To be future ready and to achieve more from accelerating digital transformation and customer experience journeys in this ever-changing world, enterprises need to digitally transform the way they conduct business and processes. Digital transformation by XtractEdge Guided Buying shows the way to simple and convenient procurement. It intends to empower buyers to meet objectives in line with new business demands and provide customizable solutions that boost margins by streamlining and optimizing procurement processes.