Moving product from supplier to buyer is one of the biggest challenges brands face amid supply chain disruptions that have driven a wedge in the procurement process. But nobody moves quite like JAGGAER.
Headquartered within the Research Triangle in North Carolina, JAGGAER is a software platform that automates procurement for major clients like Siemens, JLL, AstraZeneca and even the government of Dubai. The company’s flagship solution, JAGGAER ONE, is a part of what CEO Jim Bureau has dubbed the autonomous commerce revolution, wherein procurement relationships maintain themselves.
“At its highest level, JAGGAER ONE brings buyers, suppliers and things together on a SaaS platform,” Bureau explained to Modern Shipper.
To do that, JAGGAER automates a customer’s entire sourcing relationship from where it sources to how it contracts for those services to how it manages the supplier portfolio. Unlike many procurement companies, the platform manages both direct and indirect procurement, as well as upstream and downstream.
“The question is: How do you take that technology and not only apply it to your internal systems, but take third-party data from other sources and pull that in so that you can make material decisions off of that?” Bureau asked.
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JAGGAER has the answer. The company draws on the 26 years of internal data that it has tracked since its founding, but it also leverages third-party data sources to paint a more complete picture of procurement supply chain conditions. Those historical and real-time insights can really save the day for brands.
“I’ll give you an example,” Bureau began. “The average microchip used to sit on a shelf for 45 days. That’s gone down to five days. And so when you think about how quickly they’ve got to turn those items around, it’s changed drastically, so that requires something like auto replenishment, right? It also requires some autonomous sourcing to say, ‘Hey, when we see things evolving in the marketplace, how do we proactively shift resources from point A to point B, give you actually a real-world example as to what’s going on right now as we speak?’”
Given the trends of the past few decades, being aware of real-world conditions is more important than ever on the supply side. For years, manufacturers and buyers have placed heavy emphasis on consolidating their supplier bases, reducing them to as few touch points as possible, which at the time made sense economically.
But that’s all changed — with supply chain disruptions showing no signs of slowing down, the pitfalls of that strategy are being exposed.
“Two things happened in that exercise. One is it left [buyers] somewhat exposed to things like pandemics, geographical unrest, political unrest, what have you,” Bureau explained. “We’ve also seen quite a material shift in people’s focus on ESG topics, and the vendor consolidation that they were once very focused on achieving has left them a little bit exposed to try to manage that.”
Sourcing has been the source of many a headache for brands throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. But the indirect effect of that has been a new emphasis on procurement strategies, with procurement specialists beginning to get a seat at the table when it comes to major company decisions.
“What you’re finding is that procurement, particularly in the direct materials space, is having a direct impact on top-line revenue for these organizations, because if you can’t acquire the goods and services that are necessary to sell products and services, it’s a pretty material impact,” Bureau said. “And that hasn’t always been the case in the market that we’re serving.”
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But now that it is the case, JAGGAER has a role to play. With JAGGAER ONE’s real-time insights on everything from supply chain disruptions to geopolitical instability, buyers are automatically matched with suppliers that fit their product and delivery specifications, allowing them to switch between procurement partners at will depending on the conditions.
For example, Bureau said, when the pandemic first hit, JAGGAER was hit with hundreds of messages from its hospital clients, which were struggling to get personal protective equipment as quickly as they needed it. Without a human needing to do anything, the platform was able to match those customers with different suppliers that could deliver the gear quickly.
“I use the term resiliency — being able to be resilient to the ramifications that are going on in the industry and able to adjust and change your parameters based upon the market conditions that present themselves,” Bureau explained.
The software can even provide proactive insights into events that haven’t even happened, helping customers avoid a fiasco like the Suez Canal blockage last year.
JAGGAER also manages the more tedious aspects of supplier relationships, things like contracts and payments. Earlier this month, JAGGAER acquired contract analytics company DocSkiff, which Bureau refers to as “our diamond in the rough,” to improve its offering in that regard.
With DocSkiff’s AI and machine learning capabilities, JAGGAER’s software can now read contracts and assess areas of risk, like a limitation of liability. That’s a major time-saving advantage for buyers
“We can take something that used to take a team of 10 to 15 lawyers six months, 12 months, and go through it in a matter of weeks,” Bureau said.
Bureau and JAGGAER have also been hard at work automating procurement at the point of sale. Just this week, the company announced a new partnership with payments-as-a-service provider Finexio that will integrate B2B payment technology into JAGGAER ONE, covering channels from automated clearing house payments to wire transfers.
From finding new procurement partners to managing relationships with old ones, an autonomous sourcing platform like JAGGAER’s can serve as the Tylenol for buyers’ procurement headaches. Now their goods can source themselves.
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