Suplari

The current business environment is pushing companies to streamline operations and maximize efficiency with fewer resources. Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to help companies achieve these goals, but many applications have not produced meaningful results. Suplari is a pivotal tool in this transition, offering an industry leading unified data model, rich analytics and AI powered agents. These AI powered agents constantly scour your data to identify actionable opportunities to drive efficiency. Suplari completes this capability with workflows that guide procurement professionals through the process of capturing the value identified.

Suplari was founded in 2017, acquired by Microsoft in 2021 and became an independent company again in November of 2023. The Microsoft acquisition underscored Suplari’s significance in the industry.

“Witnessing firsthand the advancement of compelling AI-powered features at Microsoft, we are now thrilled to apply those learnings to Suplari and rapidly innovate with generative AI” says Jeff Gerber, CEO of Suplari, reflecting on the company’s journey.

Suplari is now poised to move swiftly as an independent company, capitalizing on its AI expertise to address pressing market needs. This strategy improves time to value and empowers procurement teams to better manage a broad range of essential, company-wide metrics, including diversity, risk and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores— factors that have become increasingly important during challenging economic times.

Differentiating Suplari is its commitment to helping customers achieve their desired outcomes such as reducing costs or increasing velocity of the business. Suplari’s customer-centric approach ensures a greater return on investment and strengthens clients’ competitive positions in their industries.

“Suplari is unique in that we have the mentality and agility of a startup with the expertise and customer base of an established company” says Gerber.

Supporting the Requirements of Modern Procurement

Businesses are focused on spending intelligently and responsibly by partnering with suppliers who share their goals. Procurement teams are now challenged with more responsibilities in category management, including meeting environmental objectives, cyber risk requirements and supporting diversity initiatives.

Professionals must go beyond their usual duties to understand supplier profiles, positions on diversity and complicated supply chains. The interconnected global economy increases the need to identify and mitigate risks. As trade volume and supplier diversity grow, the data required to manage the pace of business also intensifies.

Unlike platforms that require extensive set up and customization, Suplari is an out-of-the-box solution that allows companies to adopt game-changing technology without lengthy implementation cycles, the need for system integrators or major internal efforts. Having said that, Suplari is easily extensible and can be quickly tailored for customers. This includes the ability to incorporate new data fields, dimensions, and custom reporting.

Various data sources are integrated into the Suplari platform, enhancing traditional spend analytics by normalizing and harmonizing supplier information and integrating external data. This enables organizations to gain transparency in their spending, ultimately facilitating informed decision-making and strategic procurement practices.

Delivering Rapid Results with Advanced AI and Prescriptive Workflow

Suplari redefines organizational efficiency with its rapid time-to-value and actionable insights. Traditional software products, such as large Procure-to-Pay (P2P) or Source-to-Pay (S2P) suites, demand years of implementation and significant financial investments. Suplari offers a platform that can be deployed within weeks, providing immediate value and integrating with existing P2P or S2P systems to enhance their capabilities.

“Our solution offers quick value by being agile and effective even with incomplete data,” says Gerber.

Suplari focuses on customer value by applying an incremental implementation approach. Organizations can use basic accounts payable invoice data to gain insights and analytics and quickly meet their initial goals. Over time, they can incorporate additional datasets such as purchase orders, contracts, receipts, and third-party data to achieve deeper insights and comprehensive analytics.

Central to Suplari’s offerings is the Insight Generator platform which enables authoring, entitlements and provisioning of AI powered agents. Suplari agents utilize machine learning and generative AI to identify data-driven opportunities for cost savings, risk mitigation, and goal achievement.

A robust authoring capability enables rapid integration of new insights, enhancing the platform’s adaptability. The user experience is pleasing and intuitive and requires minimal training which is rare in the procurement and enterprise software landscape. The platform’s flexible and structured data model efficiently gathers and harmonizes information from multiple sources, improving procurement analytics and tailoring data to meet specific procurement needs.

Suplari has leveraged this platform to build a robust Library of out-of-the-box insights addressing various domains, including compliance, risk management, contract optimization and ESG/ Diversity goals. Specific examples of insights include category consolidation, purchase price variance, early contract renewal to name a few. Suplari can also build custom insights to address specific customer needs. The Insight Generator platform is now being extended to allow partners and customers to build agents to capture their own best practices and learning.

Suplari completes the promise of delivering real ROI through its insights with the Connect feature. Connect is a natively integrated performance and savings workflow and task management system that connects opportunities identified from Insight agents to prescriptive tasks designed to ensure that value identified is effectively captured. Tasks can be assigned, effort is tracked and Connect savings impact reports provide a complete view of how Suplari is delivering real impact to the customer.

Driving Real Impact

Suplari is designed to be an indispensable tool for daily use, not a one-and-done solution. Its insights, KPI monitoring, and case management features ensure that users remain engaged with the product every day.

British Telecom (BT) is a prime example of how Suplari can have a significant impact. As a long-time customer with a diverse set of spend categories spread across a multitude of different ERP and P2P systems deployed around the globe, BT faced the challenge of consolidating all this data. Suplari integrated these systems, providing a unified, comprehensive view of all spending through a single pane of glass.

The integration of this expansive network of systems was crucial during a significant market transition marked by intense price pressures in its consumer and B2B businesses. By leveraging the consolidated data, BT navigated through this transition effectively and reinvented the core of its telecom business. Its forecasting and accountability improved, and previously hard-to-solve problems were addressed.

Implementing Suplari led to massive user adoption, with hundreds of procurement and sourcing professionals at BT using the product daily. The AI capabilities embedded in the insights further drove efficiency by improving their business processes and allowing them to avoid costly mistakes. This level of visibility, actionable insights, and the ability to optimize operations were impossible before the data integration.

“At BT Sourced our goal is to take procurement into a new era, Suplari provides our team with the critical insights to enable us to manage supplier spend for a better return on investment. It’s a powerful tool that aids us in sourcing for a better future,” says Cyril Pourrat, the CPO of BT Group.

"Our solution offers quick value by being agile and effective even with incomplete data"

The positive reception from its existing customer base underscores the value of Suplari’s customer-centric culture. It engages in collaborative workshops with customers to understand their goals and challenges and identify areas for incremental improvement and strategic changes. Since its launch, Suplari has already introduced impactful features based on customer feedback including enhanced visualizations and AI powered data navigation.

Unlocking Value by Connecting Disparate Data

Having witnessed the transformative impact of connecting disparate data sets, Gerber identified a pervasive issue within the enterprise: isolated, unconnected datasets that often need to be revised and more structured. To tackle this problem, Suplari developed a robust approach to integrate data from multiple sources—from ERP and procure-to-pay systems to contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems. Suplari cleanses, integrates and harmonizes this data into a unified data model that is purpose built to drive outcomes for procurement organizations.

“When we integrate data from all these source systems into the Suplari unified data model and then enhance it with external data, we unlock incredible transparency for our customers. We also create a rich, multi-domain knowledge graph which empowers the Suplari AI to identify impactful and actionable opportunities that would otherwise not be possible in the original source systems,” Gerber explains.

Suplari offers a suite of fundamental capabilities focused on spend management which are extended by additional contract and purchase order intelligence modules. Suplari also integrates external datasets, including diversity, environmental and risk data from credible sources. Each module is crafted to deliver unique insights specific to its area, enriching the core spend analysis with deeper, modular insights tailored to the distinct needs of the user.

Expenditure categorization is a pivotal element in procurement analytics. Suplari offers a powerful categorization engine and self-service capabilities enabling category managers to define and continually improve categorization taxonomies and mappings. This iterative process encourages transparency and provides sustained enhancements in spend management.

Great Companies have Great Teams

The Suplari team is composed of a dynamic team of seasoned veterans and pioneering members from its early days, each bringing passion and a distinct set of skills. Jeff Gerber, CEO, was the original founder of Suplari with extensive enterprise SaaS leadership experience including iConclude which was acquired by HP/Opsware in 2007, and Apptio which went public in 2016 and was recently acquired by IBM.

Claude Mullins, the chief revenue officer, and his colleagues Robert Dyer and Claire Cunningham, bring extensive procurement experience helping companies around the world solve their most challenging procurement problems. Their collective expertise is pivotal in aligning customer needs with product development.

Mark Jancola stepped into the roles of CTO and CPO with a commendable history in engineering leadership, especially noted in conversational AI. His background in steering large international engineering teams and his sharp product insight greatly enrich the company. A robust team of engineers supports him and continually drives innovation within the product.

The design team at Suplari is central to sustaining the platform’s outstanding user experience and seamlessly integrating new features in response to feedback. Their proficiency in contemporary user interface design ensures that the platform remains intuitive and user-centric.

Our distinctive position stems from the combination of a startup mentality with the capabilities of an established company

Jessica Monroe leads Suplari’s customer success which delivers top notch customer satisfaction and project implementation. Suplari has top customer ratings and analyst scores in this area. Jessica’s background in finance helps her easily connect with customers on the problems they’re trying to solve and quickly come up with solutions.

Suplari’s culture is distinctly collaborative and customerfocused, promoting a workplace where camaraderie transcends titles and impact takes precedence over hierarchy. This philosophy attracts exceptional talent and ignites a genuine commitment to resolving customer challenges and propelling product innovation.

Paving the Path for Excellence

In the short time since gaining its independence, Suplari has focused on ensuring the satisfaction and confidence of its existing customers, solidifying its foundation, and building out its team. Having achieved these milestones, Suplari is moving forward confidently with a product roadmap centered around several main areas of development. The focus will be on advancing AI capabilities, increasing flexibility in data integration, and implementing enhancements to meet customers’ evolving needs.

The plan includes additional automation to simplify the integration process for customers, making their data seamlessly compatible with Suplari. It is also heavily investing in AI, focusing on automation and advanced interactivity. Suplari is leveraging cutting edge AI/ML to assist users with tasks, to advise and highlight focus areas, and as a core technology component within its data operations.

Suplari will expand its feature set to help customers define and execute procurement strategies. The goal is to enable customers to think strategically about their procurement functions and achieve their goals by providing rich KPIs and prescriptive workflows to continually improve them. At the heart of this effort is the development of a comprehensive set of ROI metrics and enhancing its operational efficiency metrics to provide more precise insights.

Whether you’re a skeptic or a proponent of applying AI to procurement, you should check out Suplari. They have the experience and focus of providing real, impactful outcomes that can truly transform your procurement and sourcing teams.