Introducing autonomous sourcing functionality to automate your sourcing processes

Moving towards autonomous sourcing for tail spend allows procurement professionals to shift more of their attention to items of the highest complexity and highest value while automating the simple and repetitive tasks that occur with high volume and currently take a large amount of time. This increases speed and efficiency of buying teams and reduces the effort they are spending on low value tasks.

In 2022, Fairmarkit is highly focused on improving process efficiencies for our buyers and helping them to redirect their efforts towards tasks that will produce more value for their companies. The following automation functionalities will allow you to increase the speed of end-to-end request processing while also letting you spend time addressing more strategic events.

Automated Bundling

Our automated bundling capability reviews all newly created requests for your company to make the most efficient bundles of requests for supplier invitation. Here’s how it works: 

• At a configurable interval that works for your organization, supplier recommendations are generated for all draft requests. 
• Recommended suppliers are then compared across all draft requests to which RFQs have a majority of recommended suppliers in common. 
• Using this review of supplier commonalities, the system then determines which RFQs are a good fit to be automatically bundled together. 
• Finally, the bundling process is initiated and new bundles are created from the individual draft RFQs. Individual draft RFQs are archived - allowing them to be restored if necessary.

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By optimizing your requests into bundles, they can be made more attractive to suppliers. By increasing the number of items in a single request, the total value of the items associated with this request is higher. We have seen a correlation between the total benchmark spend on requests and the engagement and number of bids received. Additionally, by bundling associated requests together, you are allowing suppliers to receive one notification to bid instead of many individual requests. This allows you to focus their attention and efforts into one single request. Both these benefits improve supplier response rates and can allow your events to be more successful.

Automated Sending

The automatic bundling capability ties in with our auto sending capability. They were developed to be able to be paired together for customers who wish to have requests automatically sent by Fairmarkit while still taking advantage of the benefits of bundling. (Though of course you can use either process independently if you wish).

When using the automated sending feature, customers configure a schedule for how frequently they would like Fairmarkit to check for new draft requests that have been imported from their ERP system. Setting up this schedule can coincide with the bundling process or be set to ensure that new requests are sent out to suppliers as quickly as possible to ensure fast turnaround time on sourcing requests.

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Companies have the flexibility to enable this functionality for their entire organization or for only specific buyers within the company to allow targeting of specific groups that can benefit the most from streamlining the beginning of the sourcing process.

Automated Awarding

The final piece in our automation functionality is automated awarding. If your organization has award information synchronized between Fairmarkit and your ERP system, you are able to benefit from our new rule-based automatic award process. This feature provides the ability for your organization to define rules and weights that govern your item awarding decisions. Currently, the system can be configured to take price, lead time, and supplier business classifications (or some combination of these) into account when making an award.

Additionally, this functionality can be configured to award either immediately after an event closes or after a specific time period passes. This gives the flexibility to allow buyers to review the event and make manual adjustments or award choices if they want to but with the backup of the automated system to ensure that requests are processed according to department timeframe goals.

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If an event is not able to be automatically awarded and requires buyer attention, they will be notified via email alert and will be able to quickly filter for the events requiring review on the application. For example, in the event that a supplier responds with an alternative, we know that additional levels of analysis and approval will be needed; therefore, we want to ensure that the correct reviews take place. Our goal is to assist buyers with saving time on the events where a straightforward decision can be made so they can focus on more detailed reviews or driving savings on more strategic purchases.

Cycle time reduction is one of the fastest ways to provide more value through increased efficiency and cost savings for your procurement team. Through automating bundling, sending, and awarding, you can focus on strategic and valuable management and allow Fairmarkit to intelligently reduce manual work and friction points along the way. 

Join us on Tuesday, March 29th at 1pm EST to learn how to make your team more efficient and reduce your cycle time.