SAP Ariba and IBM are working together to develop cognitive procurement services.
The partnership aims to achieve this by using SAP Leonardo, IBM Watson technologies and SAP Ariba, to pool together intelligence from procurement data and predictive insights from unstructured information.
This would “enable improved decision making across supplier management, contracts and sourcing activities”.
“We’ve built a cognitive procurement platform trained specifically to understand procurement transactions and unstructured data such as weather, non-standard part numbers in contracts and complex pricing structures,” said Jesus Mantas, general manager, cognitive process transformation of IBM Global Business Services.
“By combining the power of IBM Watson on the IBM Cloud with SAP Ariba, we are leaping existing procurement benchmarks and delivering unprecedented value to our joint clients.”
Alex Atzberger, president of SAP Ariba said: “Today marks a major milestone for procurement. With the deep horizontal integration capabilities native within SAP Ariba’s mature platform and the innovative capabilities of SAP Leonardo and IBM Watson delivered by the industry’s most experienced and trusted providers, companies can realise an even more intelligent source-to-settle process for managing all categories of spend that creates value across the entire business.”