EXECUTIVE BIO

TITLE: SOLUTION ENGINEERING AND CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT PRINCIPAL

COMPANY: AERA TECHNOLOGY

INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY AND AI

LOCATION: US

In her role, Chaplain implements Aera’s core technologies and also designs decision intelligence workflows for global companies. “I am a passionate evangelist for data science and machine learning to enable predictive, self-healing supply chains,” she says.

This approach combines data science with digital technologies to understand the business, make recommendations, take action, and learn from decisions and outcomes.

With AI and ML constantly analysing data, teams can consider more variables in purchasing and supply chain decisions than before. The system identifies patterns that people might miss, enabling teams to act quickly as market conditions shift.

Also, by capturing decisions and their outcomes, procurement teams can (for instance) better understand discrepancies between budgeted and actual spend. They can balance risk, cost, quality, and other factors whilst making sure that decisions and outcomes align with business objectives.

What benefits is automation bringing procurement?

With improved tools to analyse data, and digitise and automate decisions, procurement teams are identifying new opportunities for cost reduction and savings.

One of the best outcomes is improved communication, collaboration, and accountability, not just within the team but across the enterprise and its ecosystem of customers, suppliers, service providers, and partners.

To give one example, a global consumer packaged goods company is using decision intelligence to identify purchaseprice variance (PPV) in direct materials procurement. This allows the team to identify and correct issues with poor master

Automation: one answer to demands of supplier sourcing

By using a combination of mechanical models, software and hardware to analyse supplier bids and stakeholder scenarios, sourcing optimisation identifies ‘optimal’ sourcing decisions.

This automation allows organisations to:

• Conduct exponentially larger and more frequent sourcing events across subcategories in areas like MRO, facilities management, and lab supplies

• Provide the transparency and visibility needed to make informed choices between competing stakeholder interests

• Source more categories including complex, strategic to the business, traditionally off limit categories, like management consulting services, legal, creative agencies and marketing

• Set and evaluate broader selection criteria such as incumbency, risk, performance, quality, capacity, and, of course, cost

• Identify the best outcome in minutes, not weeks

Kristian O’Meara, VP of Strategic Initiatives at JAGGAER, says of e-sourcing automation: “Procurement teams are measured on their ability to continuously drive costs down or out, and increasingly are tasked with building supplier relationships that contribute to innovation and differentiation.

“It’s a tall order, and it’s one that requires a more strategic sourcing model leveraging automation to maximise the power of people and process.” data, misalignment of pricing data between systems, purchase orders and invoices that aren’t compliant with contracts, and manual pricing changes.

In contrast to relying on spreadsheets to find gaps and then communicating with suppliers for corrections, the company is now automatically identifying issues, accepting auto-generated recommendations for corrections needed, and automatically deferring to a supplier for closure, eliminating the need for manual action.

Not only has the company dynamically streamlined its PPV management and vendor collaboration, but it has also identified practices that weren’t aligned with company-wide procurement processes.

Transformations such as these are possible for procurement teams across a range of industries, and the companies that start this journey now will be better able to innovate for the future.