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Procurement Skillset

Making Direct Procurement More Efficient and Strategic

The Procurement Skillset enables a highly efficient and streamlined procurement process by automating daily procurement tasks while giving the visibility required to augment and automate sourcing decision making.

The Aera Procurement Skillset provides solutions to the challenges inherent with the complex reality of managing sourcing and procurement today. The Skillset addresses the traditional challenge companies face sourcing raw materials and semi-finished goods from thousands of suppliers at a time across disparate systems using multiple supplier collaboration mechanisms, including EDI, emails, and phone calls. It addresses the need to increase buyer productivity, ensure production schedule adherence, and measure supplier performance while minimizing cost. The Skillset focuses on direct procurement, with an emphasis on RFQs, POs, and related transactions driving purchasing of materials that drive margin, performance, and competitive advantages.

With the Procurement Skillset, Aera integrates procurement strategy with the day-to-day operations of a business, automating the direct procurement process and recommending the right supplier based on performance, cost, timeliness, and key priorities. The Skillset proactively and automatically checks and ensures contract compliance, predicts supplier delivery delays and lead times, and recommends the best course of action for changes and supply exceptions.

Benefits

  • Aligns day-to-day operations with procurement strategy.
  • Automates decision making and execution based on configurable business policies and rules.
  • Improves buyer productivity by automating day-to-day operational tasks
  • Collects, cleans, classifies, and organizes all cost data, helping organizations identify the root causes behind unexpected margin dilution.
  • Improves contract compliance to ensure appropriate terms are applied and potential savings goals are met.
  • Delivers In-depth insights and recommendations on sourcing strategies and organizational spend performance.
  • Proactively evaluates and addresses supply risks, making recommendations on how to mitigate those risks.
  • Makes the purchasing function more strategic by automating tactical sourcing activities and the evaluation of supplier bids based on various factors like price, quality, and more.
  • Improves supplier relationships by continuously monitoring the supplier scorecards and performance reports.

Cognitive Skills

  • Purchase Order Lifecycle Automation Skill automates day-to-day procurement operations, including purchase requisition conversion, RFQ deployment, and pull-in/push-out requests. The Skill automates routine processes, freeing up buyers to focus exclusively on exception management.
  • Supplier-Buyer Collaboration Skill accelerates the exchange of detailed information between buyers and vendors. The Skill brings visibility to the buyer and vendor on the necessary information for making effective decisions. It also automates the collaboration of information from buyer to vendor, leading to improvement in supply chain agility.
  • Spend Visibility Skill increases the coverage of spend managed for direct and indirect procurement. The Skill aggregates, harmonizes, and classifies data from multiple sources, as per the industry standard taxonomy, increasing the coverage and end-to-end visibility of spend. Savings are realized through cost reduction and best practices.
  • Payment Terms Optimization Skill recommends the right contractual terms to maximize value. The Skill finds opportunities to renegotiate when the same supplier has multiple contracts with different terms, or if terms are different from other suppliers in the same category. It also identifies opportunities for early payment discounts.
  • Four-Way Match Skill takes advantage of having a single view of the supply chain to make matching across purchase orders, invoices, receipts, and inspections a reality. This skill ensures terms are met before the supplier invoice is processed for payment.
  • Best Supplier Skill recommends the best supplier based on the supplier performance using scorecards. These scorecards can be configured to include a wide range of metrics or categories, including quality, delivery, price, responsiveness, financial health, payment terms, and compliance.
  • Contract Coverage Skill ensures contracts for materials are in place to meet forecasted demand and recommends allocations to selected vendors. The Skill also discovers new sourcing and contracting opportunities based on insights derived from materials requirements.
  • Supply Resilience Skill provides insights on supply chain resilience and the potential impact of at-risk suppliers. The Skill looks at different data sources and recommends alternatives to mitigate the supply risks.
  • Purchase Price Variance (PPV) Skill automatically identifies deviations between the actual purchase price of an item and its standard or baseline price. The Skill identifies the variances and their root causes, making recommendations on how to rectify the difference.