4 Cognitive Tools That Are Advancing Procurement

Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed by the magnitude and potential of cognitive technology. The greatest journeys start with that all-important first step and, when it comes to AI, you just need to get started!

Photo by Russ Hendricks

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There’s a lot of buzz around how ready our industry is to start using some of the newest cognitive technologies. But the time really is now for CPOs and procurement organisations to put a stake in the ground on where they want to go in the future with regards to digital and cognitive capabilities, to put the roadmap in place for how they want to get there.

We feel your cognitive pain!

Graham Wright, IBM Vice President, Global Procurement and Cognitive Procurement Services, fully understand procurement’s pain points and challenges when it comes to implementing cognitive technology and digitising the function:

1. Outing the analog!–  Many procurement teams are still working in a reactive and transactional world without digitised processes to automate transactions.
2. Powering the marketplaces!– From Graham’s experience, he sees very little in the way of supplier catalogs and automation driven from those catalogs. “In a digital world we should be leveraging marketplaces – ensuring   we make content available to all of the users so they can find what they need, click on it, and drop it in their shopping basket easily.
3. Predicting demand – Current practice is to look at the spend information from historical data in order to make decisions. Nowadays, there are ways to anticipate and predict demand so procurement can look forward, instead of back.
4. High value contribution – Lack of digitisation and lack of insight means that key personnel in strategic sourcing and category management are not able to focus on stakeholder management, interaction with the user, and negotiations with the supplier

4 cognitive tools you can use…NOW! 

But in spite of these challenges, and whether you like it or not, cognitive technology is coming to change the world.

Not everyone will be ready to jump into the cognitive capabilities. But it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition; you can plug in cognitive at any step. Many of these tools are proven and in use through IBM Procurement today and are being prepared for a broader market. Graham took us through four of these cognitive tools.

1. Supply Chain Risk Insightscognitive solution fetches unstructured data from social media and creates alerts ahead of time for category managers who can take preventive action to reduce or eliminate impact from such challenges. Effective demand forecasting and proactive risk management is critical to a responsive and cost effective supply chain.
2. SupplierIQcombines data gleaned through unstructured sources (e.g. social media, news feeds, competitor websites, corporate social platforms, blogs and forums etc.) and contrasts that with other data sources to generate insights that were earlier not accessible. A category manager could actually stumble upon a new supplier for a category that was not being considered; or actually drop an existing supplier because of the potential risk an existing supplier by connecting performance with market information.
3. PricingIQ can save category managers millions of dollars by tracking contract prices in contrast with dynamic market prices rather than sticking to contract prices that are struck for a number of years. This tool allows IBM Procurement Services category managers an additional 3 – 10 per cent in savings in key spend categories over and beyond what’s already been saved. Pricing IQ was awarded Most Innovative Use of Technology by CIPS in 2017.
4. Cognitive Buying Assistant(CBA) drives user adoption and spend under management and ease of use. IBM are designing superior user experience by applying cognitive tools on a mobile app that can recommend most relevant items to buy based on user profile, usage patterns as well as sentiment analysis gleamed out of feedback from other users. Ordering something in your professional capacity will soon be as easy as ordering products in your personal life. This is a critical driver of user adoption since a better buying experience will lead to better compliance and better savings for the user and business.

Your path to cognitive 

Everyone’s roadmap will be different and every procurement organisation comes into this maturity scale at different points. Where some larger procurement teams are already embracing technologies like Blockchain and Dynamic Marketplaces, others are not quite there.

If you’re of the latter group, start by asking yourself how you can get more out of the data you’re sitting on. How can you gain better insights and advanced analytics from all the spend and transactional data that flows through procurement?

Lastly, consider whether you have the right talent to help you along on your journey.

With more robust data and insights, the more you will free up your people to do what they are meant to do!

Live From The Big Ideas Summit

Want to hear more from IBM’s Graham Wright? On 28th September, Procurious is bringing The Big Ideas Summit to Chicago.  Register now  (It’s FREE!) as a digital delegate to gain access to all of the day’s action and LIVE video from our speakers and attendees.