Agentic Supplier Management

Supplier onboarding was reactive. In roughly 90 percent of cases a supplier was created in SAP only when the first invoice arrived, which means the purchase had already happened before anyone checked the supplier. Every qualification step, from NDA to certificate to sanctions check, came after the money was spent, if it came at all. For a certification audit that meant a very critical finding!

Anyone with SAP access could create a supplier record, so the same company existed many times over, one of their suppliers fifteen times. That means fifteen places for payment terms to differ, fifteen chances to pay the same invoice twice, and no way to see total spend with a supplier that should have been negotiating with.

Negotiated conditions never reached the people who bought. Framework agreements sat in desk drawers and email archives, invisible to local sites, which kept ordering from the same suppliers at the old prices. Central procurement had done the negotiation; the company paid as if it had not. Nobody could say which contracts existed, which had expired, or which supplier carried what risk. When a customer or auditor asked, the answer was a search through inboxes.

Three consequences followed: money left on the table at every site, a supplier base that could not pass an audit, and a procurement team that spent its time reconstructing information instead of using it.