Headquarters: Europe

Industry: Procurement Management

Department: IT

Challenge: To optimize the tail spend analysis for procurement management and supplier negotiation carried out by the organization manually, thereby improving the opportunity cost lost in the process.

Solution: Implemented DataSwitch’s DS Integrate No-Code platform for the seamless transformation of unstructured data from different suppliers into the structured format called for by the client to deduce meaningful inferences.

Business Outcome: 

• Deployment of AI-based self-serviceable data analytics platform for automated data extraction and analysis from all supplier documents.
• Cut down the additional expenditure through analysis across multitudes of price movements amongst suppliers.
• Enhanced the success rate by tapping the best fit performer amongst the existing supplier through robust Tail Spend Analytics.
• Earned the position of a trustable data transformation partner with the client.

A Brief History 

Our client is a leading Business Process Management (BPM) company offering an entire spectrum of services to organizations across different industrial verticals. This project in partnership DataSwitch has been carried out for a Europe-based Life Sciences client, to support the optimization of their procurement management activities.

The Challenge

The client has near to half a thousand suppliers working shoulder-to-shoulder with different departments across the organization. The result? Tens of thousands of quotations, each with a format of its own, received under different file extensions became a routine. This coupled with the well-known ethnicity of the continent with different languages playing their role in introducing more variations in the information received from the suppliers.

Due to the lack of standardization, the tons of data available in its repository couldn’t be put to work by the organization to optimize its procurement. Their conventional manual practice of carrying out these tasks only resulted in minuscule cost savings despite the high time invested. All their efforts of manual data extraction into a spreadsheet and analyzing the details by each line item weren’t really coping up with the pace demanded by each deliverable.

At this very moment, an organization is faced with two choices: to hire subject matter experts, spend on the infrastructures to create the necessary solutions, or outsource the task to the service providers having the palpable expertise ready to be deployed.

The organization chose the latter and the requirement was then turned into a Statement-of-Work for their Business Process Management alliance, who then, went on to search for innovative solutions available in the market suiting their needs. The vision was to build a solution that could combine all the key inputs from the different suppliers and transform them into a unified knowledge storage that can also be referred to and analyzed.

The herculean task called for a team that could not only provide the value proposition but also delivers perceivable results over a short horizon. After a series of meticulous assessments and the first-hand demonstration of the highly efficient work nature, DataSwitch was offered the opportunity to partner with the BPM alliance of the client to take up the challenge of turning the concept into reality.

The Solution

Picking up the key transactional data from each quotation amongst a pile of thousands and transforming them into a standard format for the ease of analyzing them is a task that is breathtaking just at the glance of it. Exclusive efforts were taken from DataSwitch to look into the inherent variations in the inputs available to understand them at the grass-root levels. Each of the file formats, be it a pdf document or an image, were studied carefully leaving nothing unattended. The result was to find answers to the following questions – what critical data needs to be extracted and how the data extraction is to be carried out. Upon careful discussions with the client, all the quintessential information needed for them was taken note of and the team got started with the execution phase.

We assessed all the inputs that we could lay our hands upon and brainstormed our way into deducing the most effective solution for the problem statement at hand, taking in all the support possible from AI.

With the aid of the DataSwitch Integrate Platform, we developed a model that could specifically annotate all the information of interest to the client from any file it is being fed. Quotations from different suppliers of our client were chosen initially to train the AI model we developed. The model began to learn and our solution was working its way through.

All the unstructured data was taking its shape in the transformation onto a standardized format. This format was then leveraged into serving as the base to build upon the Knowledge Storage driven by Big Data tech. The efforts to handpick the supplier documents by the client were greatly reduced through the provisions for unconditional data download. Nevertheless, our offerings didn’t stop at being a massive storehouse of information, but we also drilled in a step further by providing the analytics for the client to deduce inferences from the extracted data for taking well-informed procurement decisions.

All the data transformed would be put through our rigorous predictive analysis model, which can analyze the correlations and patterns between the pricing across the years and across different suppliers. These Tail Spend Analytics would then be used to provide suggestions to initiate negotiations across the recurrent purchases, capturing the base price for saving and also depicting the savings made across the different procurements carried out by the organization.

What purpose would an innovation serve, should it suffer the clutches of scalability? We, at DataSwitch always bear this in mind while devising solutions for our clients, to provide one that is sustainable in the long run. Our process automation allows for data extraction and standardization of all the supplier documents covering 100% of the transactional data in comparison with the southwards of 5% which was achieved with the client’s manual process. This when combined with the near to perfection accuracy made possible by our AI/ML models, would strive continuously to improve the process outcomes with each result trying to be better than the previous.

DataSwitch doesn’t believe that our duty ends with the deployment of our solution. We would make ourselves available throughout, to provide professional assistance on the clarifications that may arise during the usage of the solution by the client. In line with this belief, we had an exclusive team to address and resolve the issues on the fly.

The Business Outcome:

Being introduced to our high potential DS Integrate for structuring and annotating the heaps of the unstructured data, took away a huge burden off the shoulders of our client. The unprecedented task of skimming through the supplier quotations to find the one which best suited their requirement was within their very reach and the benefits reaped were translated in terms of monetary savings with no delay.

Furthermore, our solutions always come with the ease of being self-serviceable and it enhanced the data structuring for our client to 400+ supplier inputs accounting for 80,000+ different documents. To sum up, we provided the best-in-class solution for data structuring combined with the predictive price analysis incorporating the traits of being scalable while also being easy to use. Our no-code offerings have saved yet another day and helped our client stay abreast of the digital transformation the world undergoes. We added another feather to our hat when we eventually landed up being our client’s go-to data transformation partner, after their experience with our services and support rendered.

The DataSwitch suite of products facilitates delivering bigger and better insights from your data, the one that you wouldn’t have thought to be possible.

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