Emerging technologies are poised to play a major role in the procurement and supply chain worlds. Robotic Process Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning can provide great cost reduction and risk mitigation benefits in supply chains. Inefficiencies account for about 4% of spend in typical transactional costs.

Digital Vendor Contracting, major benefits:

1. Fraud Proofing, by digitizing with Blockchain. This technology helps to provide fraud deterrent capabilities.
2. Error Proofing, as machines are learning the contractual language to mitigate the risk of costly errors. Machine learning is becoming more and more autonomous and capable of eliminating the ability for errors to exist in the contractual environment.
3. The speed of processing contracts will increase over time as machines and robots possess the capability to accurately prepare huge volumes of contract. This means that contracts will end up costing a mere fraction of the current cost.

Digital Vendor Selection, major benefits:

1. The speed of Vendor Selection has been increasing dramatically through machine learning algorithms.
2. The probability of selecting the right vendor has been increasing through adaptive machine learning. Confidence levels are increasing by the minute, as machines learn from new data sets.
3. Red Flag capability, the ability to quickly and accurately spot suppliers that have critical issues is priceless.

Both contacting, and vendor selection is benefiting from the digital era. Robotics can also to reduce non-value workflows by leveraging “Smart Workflows”. High-value procurement talent can focus on more strategic matters.

Recommended Reading

• Vendor Risk Management

NLPA Learning: Looking for authoritative procurement templates, tools, webinars, and more? Stop trying to create resources from scratch and start taking advantage of having exactly what you need right at your fingertips in NLPA Learning.