Applying AI to Procurement and Finance Data on AWS

Guest post by Nikesh Parekh, CEO of Suplari, Inc.

In the fall of 2016, Jeff Gerber, Suplari’s co-founder and CTO, approached me with a simple solution to a growing business problem. He had noticed that most data within organizations was too siloed, making it hard to surface basic analytics. Similarly, I had observed that “Big Data” was growing rapidly within the enterprise, leading to more inconsistencies within the data. This in turn was creating inaccuracies in reporting—a necessary tool for helping executives make strategic business decisions. Many large organizations don’t have a solution in place to help comb through the piling amounts of spend, contract, and invoice data. As a result, each line item must be reviewed manually. The process is inefficient and leaves little time to drive the right business outcomes.

Jeff, myself, and our other Suplari co-founder, Brian White had a vision. As a team of serial Seattle entrepreneurs with deep enterprise, data, and cloud experience, we wanted to shine the light on such inefficiencies by enabling companies to uncover cost-saving opportunities using AI, so they can invest in growth, innovation, and their people. The three of us were committed to combining the cloud with Artificial Intelligence so employees would be empowered to be more productive and companies would be more nimble when dealing with changing market conditions, business volatility, and technology disruption. And from this vision, Suplari was born.

Suplari is as an AI-driven intelligent application that sits on top of existing financial and procurement systems. Our platform uses the cloud to move core data from each of those systems. Using AI, Suplari’s platform is constantly normalizing and analyzing procurement and finance data to help enterprises look for opportunities to increase profit, reduce spend, mitigate risk, ensure compliance, streamline processes, improve visibility, and enhance team productivity.

Inside AI for Procurement and Finance

As I mentioned in one of my recent Suplari blog posts introducing our Intelligence platform, procurement as a whole has a lot of moving parts. Procurement and finance teams are challenged with knowing and understanding all the indirect and direct spend that occurs within an organization. Among the current procurement and finance software applications that support this herculean effort, there a few things that Suplari does the best out of all of them:

1.  Augment – Suplari moves contract, payables, T&E, corporate card, POs, invoices, supplier, and usage data into the cloud which then integrates with our Suplari Unified Data Model. The Suplari algorithm cleanses, normalizes, and categorizes all of the data related to purchasing. By connecting the data to points in the application, Suplari helps makes the data stronger than it was originally.

2. Analyze – Suplari’s platform provides enterprises with a modern analytics and BI tool, to empower everyone in the organization with the necessary insights to drive business outcomes.

3. Automate – The Suplari intelligence platform is constantly monitoring, analyzing, and scoring your supplier spend and contracts to uncover new ways for finance and procurement teams to reduce spend, reduce risk, and increase compliance to policies.

Suplari’s Growing Library of Insights

Our data science team is constantly working on new ways to improve our growing library of insights so customers can drive the best business decisions to their organization.  As part of this mission we have rolled out the following intelligence packs to extend the value of our platform:

Spend Intelligence analyzes all the transaction data within a company, such as the T&E and corporate card data. By organizing the data from these transactions, teams have real-time visibility of what is being purchased and can avoid surprises that may comprise cash flow or risk to the organization.

Contract Intelligence identifies the opportunities that were previously hidden in your contract management system. This information gives teams the ability to negotiate better contract renewals, aggregate demand, and identify suppliers operating without a contract.

Purchasing Intelligence reviews a company’s buying and procurement process by analyzing purchase orders (PO’s) against data from Contract Intelligence and Spend Intelligence packs.   Procurement and finance teams can now proactively improve compliance, manage spend, identify fraud and abuse, and improve the overall buying process.

CFOs, COOs, CPOs and procurement leaders alike rely on Suplari to gain better visibility into their processes and spend, optimize costs, drive compliance and reduce operational risk to see real change within their organization.  As a Suplari customer, Sonos was able integrate the Suplari platform in less than 21 days. By connecting their data from multiple legacy systems, Sonos immediately found opportunities for risk reduction and identified additional spend for the procurement team.

Additionally, Twenty-First Century Fox was able to cleanse, normalize, and categorize their spend and supplier data within six weeks of implementation. Twenty-First Century Fox was using eight ERP systems to manage their spend. With Suplari they were able to gain visibility into all of their spend and expand the usage of the platform to both finance and sales teams.

To see a live demo of how Suplari is applying AI to procurement and finance through the Suplari Intelligence platform using your own data, contact Suplari at info@suplari.com.