99,6%
Automation rate
"The Agents are basically a cheaper more scalable and faster-to-onboard alternative to external services"
Head of Procurement Excellence, T1 Global Manufacturer
The Company
A global Tier-1 industrial manufacturer with more than 25 billion dollar in revenue and over 100,000 employees. moved the review of every PR from a manual, region-by-region process to an agent-run workflow. Within six months Agents were reviewing and approving three out of four requisitions on its own. After twelve months it was 99.6 percent. Cycle time for a review went from weeks to seconds.
The Challenge
A year ago, every requisition went to a reviewer in the requester's region. The reviewer opened it, read the attached quote, checked its validity date, verified whether a framework contract applied, compared the price against previous orders, checked that the cost center matched the account, and confirmed that all required forms were attached.
Whenever something was missing, the reviewer emailed the requester, waited, followed up, adjusted the requisition and reviewed it again. Only then did it move into approval.
This model does not scale. More workload means either more delays or more headcount. And the work itself, however necessary, adds no value: it is reading, comparing and chasing, done by hand around 170,000 times a year. Worse still, the people doing it had been hired to negotiate, source and drive strategic work.
With Lio
Today, that reality looks different: the checking, comparing and chasing runs on its own, and buyers spend their time where they were hired to make a difference: negotiating, sourcing and shaping strategy.
PR Checks & Approvals
Lio sits in the approval chain like any technical approver. Instead of a human, the agent runs roughly 60 checks against the company's global standard: procurement channel, previous orders, price threshold, contract type, payment terms, and so on.
Once everything checks out, the PR is flipped into a PO without a buyer ever touching it. And when something is off, the agents handle it among themselves. One triggers the next: a missing attachment, for example, is now resolved end to end by agents, because chasing paperwork is not what a strategic buyer should spend their time on.
Tailspend Negotiation & Sourcing Agents
Whenever a price sits above previous orders or a quote is missing, the negotiation and sourcing agents step in. They benchmark the price internally and externally and open a negotiation or sourcing event with the supplier.
Only the cases an agent cannot close on its own reach a person, and those arrive with the agent's summary and recommendation attached. Every check and every decision is logged so they understand the Agents reasoning.
Results
Lio performed so well, that the Manufacturer decided to also onboard all the other Regions with Lio in six weeks instead of hiring new people that would probably need a training of another three to six months.
Lio went live one region at a time: the Americas in July, Western Europe in August, Eastern Europe in September, China and APAC in October, India in November.
The share of requisitions handled by the agents rose every month, the 75 percent target for year-end was reached in December, and the rate kept climbing to 99.6 percent in the second half of the first year.
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Christoph Baeumer
CPO, Bilfinger
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