Automate renewals and negotiations on managed tail materials, simulate award scenarios on total cost or security of supply, and challenge price increases with index data to protect margins. While others fight operational fires, you improve your bottom line.
Direct materials decide your margins and your ability to deliver. Yet category managers have little time to manage the tail of materials needed to keep production running. Frame agreements roll over, info records go stale, and price increase letters land faster than anyone can check them. In volatile commodities and ingredients, every unchecked increase goes straight into your cost of goods sold. To truly focus on the strategic core, the long tail needs to run on its own.
Neglected tail
materials.
Hundreds of materials, low spend, no attention. Frame agreements roll over at the last price paid, because nobody has time to renegotiate them.
Price sheets too
complex for Excel.
Hundreds of line items, tiered prices, index clauses, freight, Incoterms. Comparing bids on total cost and negotiating with several suppliers in parallel exceeds what spreadsheets, or people, are made for.
Price increases, accepted
by default.
Volatile commodities, rising input costs, unchallenged supplier letters. Without index data, cost structures, or disposable time, too many price increase requests get accepted unchallenged.
Don’t let expiring agreements roll over at the last price paid. Let our contract renewal agent flag expiring frame agreements in time and trigger re-sourcing or renegotiation automatically. Keep your call-off contracts current without buyers having to touch them.
Low-value materials deserve competition too. Run competitive RFQs for low-value, low-attention materials with our autonomous sourcing agents. Negotiate SAP S/4HANA info records using historical PO prices and commodity and raw material indices to deliver an average 4.9% savings.
The lowest bid isn't always the best deal. Compare bids on total cost, including freight, Incoterms, payment terms, and minimum order quantities. Simulate award scenarios with maximum shares per supplier, dual-sourcing rules, capacity limits, and bundle or volume discounts, and compare the trade-offs before you commit.
Complex price calculations deserve better than Excel. Analyze bids and negotiate with several suppliers across hundreds or thousands of positions, cost components, and tiered or index-linked prices in parallel. Set target prices per line item or cost element and let the negotiation agent pursue different targets per supplier within the rules you configure in our AI Negotiation Cockpit.
Don't just accept price increase requests. Let our AI negotiation agent check every request against price indices and should-cost calculations, then generate a fact-based counter-argument or counter-offer. Turn price increase requests into negotiation opportunities you are prepared for, especially in volatile market environments.
Not just another solution for Indirect materials. We deeply understand Direct Procurement and the intricacies of managed materials. Source entire Bills of Materials, negotiate call-off contracts, and read and write back info records through our native SAP S/4HANA integration, including on-premises landscapes. Define the workflows and human-in-the-loop approval steps needed to orchestrate the Source-to-Pay process for Direct materials.
Bring your tail materials under active management with autonomous renewals, RFQs, and negotiations.
Make award decisions 47% faster with total-cost comparisons and award scenario simulations.
Achieve an average 4.9% savings in tactical & tail spend negotiations, without adding headcount.
Challenge price increase requests with index and cost-structure data instead of accepting them as they arrive, protecting margins and your bottom line.
AI in Strategic SourcingThe inability to manage, analyze, and optimize complex tenders in standard sourcing tools keeps Procurement stuck in Outlook and Excel. AI enables sourcing managers to break that pattern.
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Autonomous negotiations help Procurement deliver increased cost savings with AIAI-powered autonomous negotiations give procurement the tools to save more, scale faster, and increase efficiency. Explore how it works.
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Better together: Connecting autonomous sourcing and negotiation for maximum savingsDiscover how autonomous sourcing and negotiation work together to unlock savings, optimize tail spend, and scale procurement efficiency.
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Yes. For tail materials, autonomous agents run RFQs and negotiations within rules you define. For strategic materials, agents support category managers with total-cost comparisons, award scenario modeling, and line-item negotiations, while award decisions stay with your team.
The agent combines historic prices from SAP S/4HANA info records and PO history with market reference data such as commodity and raw material indices. This creates fact-based arguments and target prices for each line item.
The agent checks each price increase request against index development and the supplier's cost structure. Based on this analysis, it generates a counter-argument or counter-offer that your team can review and use.
Yes. The native integration reads and writes back info records, contracts, and scheduling agreements in SAP S/4HANA, including on-premises installations.
You do. Human-in-the-loop approvals can be configured within workflows before any award, so agents prepare decisions and your team makes them.
Strategic sourcing optimization uses advanced algorithms to evaluate complex supplier bids across multiple variables like cost, capacity, risk, quality, sustainability and recommend the best-value award. It goes beyond lowest-price awarding to balance trade-offs across the criteria that actually matter to the business.