Procurement
Modernise Procurement: leveraging AI for automations at Mirakl
July 24, 2024
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Martin Frérot
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6
min
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July 24, 2024
·
Martin Frérot
·
6
min
There are now three in the team: him, a Head of Procurement, and an intern. When he arrived, the team was in the midst of a crucial construction phase as the Procurement team was entering a more mature phase.
The first phase, which involved building the Procurement team, establishing categorization and purchasing processes, and raising awareness of Procurement within Mirakl, was already completed.
The new phase was to advance further by tackling more strategic issues and providing real value on a global scale, supporting the company’s growth by highlighting the importance of the Procurement department and lowering purchasing thresholds.
With the boom of generative and conversational AI and a company culture very open to exploration, Bryan seized the opportunity to create an internal chatbot to enhance the adoption and understanding of procurement processes.
Named ProcureMate, this chatbot is now considered the fourth member of the team. It answers low-value questions and supports Mirakl teams throughout the purchasing process.
We see a trend towards conversational tools with Siri, Alexa, GPT – ProcureMate follows these markers: conversational, intuitive, and available on mobile to facilitate the user experience.
The primary goal of ProcureMate is to free the procurement team from its time-consuming and repetitive support function, allowing it to focus on what truly matters: RFPs and strategic projects.
The Procurement team has set a goal to have the bot answer 50-70% of common questions, and the initial internal feedback is positive and qualitative. The project will soon be presented on a global scale to advance its usage.
The ProcureMate chatbot is capable of guiding users on numerous topics related to Mirakl's purchasing policy, on which it has been trained by Bryan to provide the most accurate responses possible.
The bot is available to answer questions on:
One of the major challenges of ProcureMate is to assist employees during a strategic phase of the cycle: supplier negotiations.
The bot can provide the negotiation framework related to the purchasing policy, payment terms, and all prerequisites for contract finalization. Based on a few questions posed to the employee (supplier, context, amount, etc.), the bot can even go further by providing a summary and negotiation playbook.
With the mobile and conversational experience of GPT, Bryan asserts that we could quickly advance to the point of simulating a live negotiation to better prepare employees for the actual negotiation sessions.
To maximize the adoption of the AI chatbot ProcureMate, the Procurement team at Mirakl trains employees on this topic during procurement training workshops organized in small groups of 4-5 people, covering the following subjects:
Another way to maximize adoption is to present the project to as many internal employees as possible. ProcureMate was recently presented to the finance department and will be presented globally to Mirakl’s 700 employees in a few weeks.
Beyond sharing information internally, the adoption of the chatbot also lies in its design. Bryan designed ProcureMate to be as intuitive as possible, with a very simple starter for the user and a predefined AI response to standardize the answers given.
According to Bryan, AI will allow us to obtain and view the right information more quickly and accurately on procurement tools. It will also enable the automatic management of repetitive, tedious, and manual tasks.
The chatbot is like a kind of dopamine, allowing you to manage all these tasks in one place.
This easier information retrieval and automatic task execution will give users a different perspective on the tools, encouraging them to use them, which will ultimately strengthen their adoption.
The conversational aspect is also highly interesting for Bryan as it leverages collaboration and orchestration within the tool itself. Rather than having to open multiple tools, he expects to be able to do everything directly from the P2P very soon, thereby streamlining his operations.
On the analytical side, AI, especially through conversational interfaces, will create value by providing access to very precise information in just a few seconds from a simple request.
Thanks to AI, we can get in one question the information that would take us 10-15 minutes to find on a traditional dashboard.
AI will also enable the construction of a dashboard from scratch and the cleaning of an unusable database based on a single written phrase dictated by the user.
Bryan insists that we should not hesitate to dive into what exists in AI right now, by looking at what is being done in the market, reading content, and trying to understand the basic mechanisms, even at a high level.
The idea is not to fall behind on a rapidly evolving trend:
Citing the AI department at Mirakl, Bryan also reminds us that a very good way to learn more about AI is simply to engage with knowledgeable people within your own company. They can break down these topics for you in a friendly and funny conversation.
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To view all the short clips featured in this article and the entire interview with Bryan, please check out the full YouTube playlist just here.
To speak with a Payflows experts and understand how Payflows solution can help your Procurement team to save money, ensure adoption, gain time and reduce risks, book a demo just below !
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