Supplier relationship management (SRM) is the process of managing supplier relationships to develop and maintain a strategic procurement partnership. SRM includes focus areas such as supplier selection, procurement strategy development, procurement negotiation, and performance measurement and improvement. SRM has been around for over 20 years but we are now seeing new technologies such as machine learning come into play. What exactly does advanced analytics such as artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) have to do with SRM? And how will AI/ML technologies transform procurement? What are some real-world machine learning use cases related to supplier relationships management?

Emerging service-oriented technologies allow software agents to automatically procure distributed services to complete complex tasks. However, in many application scenarios, service providers demand financial remuneration, execution times are uncertain and consumers have  deadlines for their tasks. In this paper, we address these issues by developing a novel approach that dynamically procures multiple, redundant services over time, in order to ensure success by the deadline. Specifically, we first present an algorithm for finding optimal procurement solutions, as well as a heuristic algorithm that achieves over 99% of the optimal and is capable of handling thousands of providers. Using experiments, we show that these algorithms achieve an improvement of up to 130% over current strategies that procure only single services. Finally, we consider settings where service costs are not known to the consumer, and introduce several mechanisms that incentivise providers to reveal their costs truthfully and that still achieve up to 95% efficiency.