To meet these rising expectations, many procurement teams are turning to advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning (ML) to transform the way they make smart business buying decisions and create value for the organization. AI and ML tools have long helped procurement teams automate mundane and manual procurement processes, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives. But recent advances in natural language processing (NLP), pattern recognition, cognitive analytics, and large language models (LLMs) are "opening up opportunities to make procurement more efficient and effective," says Julie Scully, director of software development at Amazon Business. The good news is procurement teams are already well-positioned to capitalize on these technological advances. Their access to rich data sources, ranging from contracts to invoices, enables AI/ML solutions that can illuminate the insights contained within this data.

Built through the acquisition of 17 companies over approximately a 4-year timespan, the company has seen continued solid organic growth from their customers in their target markets of healthcare and consumer packaged goods and continues on their new customer acquisition journey. Westfall's corporate methodologies backed by their "Stacked Integration Model" certainly delivers as it relates to their value proposition but also has magnified the need for continuous improvement in key areas given its growth. This has resulted in a corporate structure which poses unique and nuanced supply chain challenges. The company provides end-to-end manufacturing capabilities, including product design, moldmaking, injection molding, assembly and more to a broad range of customers, and as David Schultz, VP, Chief Supply Chain Executive puts it, Westfall Technik counts "all the biggest logos" amongst its customers. Schultz, whose past experience includes several senior operating positions, more specifically, Chief Procurement Officer/Chief Supply Chain Officer for both private and publicly traded companies.

The right suppliers can transform an organization's performance. Companies that keep their supply bases in sync with the best the market has to offer generate significant competitive advantages. We find that compared to their peers, top performers can achieve cost positions that are 5 to 10 percent lower, with 20 to 50 percent less exposure to key risks such as reliance on single suppliers for critical parts. Cutting-edge supplier capabilities can also help differentiate products, boosting market share. That synchronization is becoming harder to do, however, in a fast-changing global economy where companies' lifespans keep getting shorter and supply-chain disruptions keep happening more often.

Artificial intelligence "acts" unethically in ways that are different from humans, even if the harms that both AI and humans can cause are similar. For example, even if both humans and AI can invade people's privacy, discriminate, or cause physical harm, artificial intelligence does not act with intention to cause such harm. Rather, the harm results from how artificial intelligence collects and processes data. Currently, artificial intelligence cannot achieve consciousness, though one Google engineer disagrees. Today, the type of artificial intelligence that companies are creating and incorporating into their operations and decision systems is artificial narrow intelligence, which refers to a computer's ability to perform a single task or limited tasks extremely well.

It's hard to find an industry or line of business that hasn't been transformed by artificial intelligence (AI). Whether it's by automating routine processes, or extracting valuable insights from huge volumes of data, it's had a major impact on how every part of modern organizations operate. And procurement is certainly no exception. In the procurement department, AI has helped teams make a leap that's been decades in the making -- the shift from reactive to proactive decision-making. By processing continuous streams of market and category data in real time, AI has finally made it possible for procurement teams to stay ahead of emerging trends and turn them into opportunities, instead of just reacting to them as they happen.

In a world awash with a seemingly never-ending list of technology buzzwords such as automation, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to name a few, AI is one such technology that is moving away from simple hype and stepping closer to reality in procurement. This featured in the August issue of CPOstrategy – read now! Procurement, by its very nature, is tasked with handling huge quantities of spend and with spend comes spend data. Often described by leading CPOs as a repetitive task, understanding and sorting that spend data is now being achieved through the implementation of AI. Through the use of AI, procurement teams can remove human error, increase efficiency and realise greater value from spend data.