The end game of “Autonomous” in intelligent process automation is fairly well hyped, but the concept is attainable once you understand some elements. And there is no more impactful business area than the sourcing area.
Though procurement has historically been known as the last on the digital transformation train, many new automated techniques for intelligent demand aggregation, hyper-automation of sourcing execution, and automatic awarding can help procurement teams to break ceilings when it comes to their efficiency, innovation and business impact.
To help organizations understand the impact autonomous sourcing can have on driving efficiency and agility, Spend Matters will be co-hosting an online discussion on January 19th at 1:30pm US Eastern with Fairmarkit’s Co-Founder & CEO, Kevin Frechette, and VP of Product, Amit Fernandes. They will be joined by Spend Matters contributors Pierre Mitchell, Managing Director and Bertrand Maltaverne, Senior Analyst.
Kevin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Fairmarkit, an intelligent sourcing platform. He’s spent the last three years meeting with hundreds of procurement and supply-chain executives from every industry to learn how they view and approach tail spend management. His core focus is on understanding how procurement can be transformed using data, automation, analytics, AI and machine learning.
Amit leads the product management, design, customer and market research teams at Fairmarkit. He has a passion for building effective B2B solutions with consumer-grade experiences. Amit’s expertise in B2B software, SaaS and developer platforms is derived from his experience working in both startups and global companies such as Salesforce and Deloitte. Previously, Amit led product organizations at MuleSoft where he developed their connectivity strategy, and launched a new product line for B2B enterprises to seamlessly integrate with each other. He has many years of experience advising telecommunications, media and technology enterprises to identify new revenue streams through technology initiatives.
What is autonomous sourcing?
Autonomous sourcing is a next-generation e-sourcing application that adds AI capabilities to increase event automation and provide embedded decision support. Autonomous procurement is a data-driven model that works with both historical data derived from past experiences and real-time data that is synchronized with market trends. It leverages technology to enable procurement teams to automate the entire source-to-pay process while reducing the need for human intervention. The main objective of procurement autonomous is not to eliminate the human element from the process, instead, its goal is to reduce unnecessary and time-consuming tasks, thereby allowing the workforce to focus on productive tasks and operate at a strategic level. Alongside enabling businesses to automate repetitive tasks, it provides useful insights for result-driven decision making.
Moving to autonomous sourcing can increase the speed and efficiency of the end-to-end event processing for your buying team. Autonomous sourcing automates your simple and repetitive high-volume, time-intensive tasks so you can focus on sourcing more complex, high-value strategic events. This shift increases the speed and efficiency of your team and reduces the effort you are spending on low-value tasks.
What are some of the benefits of autonomous sourcing?
Moving towards autonomous sourcing allows procurement professionals to shift more of their attention to items of the highest complexity and highest value while automating the simple and repetitive tasks that occur with high volume that are currently take a large amount of time. This increases speed and efficiency of buying teams and reduces the effort they are spending on low-value tasks.
Key takeaways include:
- Saving effort: Focus buyer time on strategic and high-value transactions by removing manual inputs through automation and reduce cycle times by 49%.
- Optimizing for results: Leverage the intelligence of autonomous sourcing to optimize RFQs for better supplier responses to achieve 2x more quotes per RFQ, driving increased competition and savings.
- Staying consistent: Remove human error and subjectivity while maintaining compliance and diversity requirements – without needing manual intervention.
What makes a good automation candidate?
While the benefits of automated processes are understood, determining who is a good fit for automation is critical for successful implementation. Having the right data, context and parameters are a prerequisite. Structured datasets feed machine learning, so having accurate and complete data helps deliver better and more reliable business outcomes. Additionally, adoption and change management play an important role to ensure proper deployment, monitoring and expansion into additional spend categories. Having the right talent in place helps establish confidence within automation to build trust and use as a force multiplier.
Join Fairmarkit and Spend Matters on January 19th at 1:30 pm US Eastern for a deep dive into the concepts and drivers around autonomous sourcing and discover how to:
- Enable procurement to do more with less
- Reduce cycle times, enhancing speed and agility
- Increase the number of sourcing events without adversely impacting procurement
- Retain key talent and position Procurement as a trusted advisor to the business
We hope you can join us. Register here for the January 19th webinar at 1:30pm US Eastern time.
