The company
This global manufacturing company, a key player in the industrial goods sector, operates an extensive network of production facilities that deliver dependable, top-tier products across B2B and consumer markets. Their procurement team operates through a centralized structure, with purchase requisitions initiated in an on-premise ERP system and procurement responsibilities segmented by plant. The team plays a vital role in managing supplier relationships and ensuring alignment with the brand’s famously high standards for service, quality, and performance.
The challenge
The procurement team routinely faced more volume than it could effectively process. With thousands of events being handled daily through legacy sourcing workflows, they didn’t have a way to effectively scale RFQ. Nor could they roll out competitive sourcing in a systematic way.
The organization recognized the need to address key areas of its procurement function:
- Adaptive Quoting Practices: As procurement demands grew in complexity, the organization relied on a flexible, manual quoting process that served immediate needs but became increasingly difficult to scale with consistency and speed.
- Growth Constraints at Scale: With sourcing needs expanding across multiple facilities, the team recognized the need for a more structured approach to support larger, high-volume events and broaden competitive sourcing efforts.
- Opportunity for Greater Alignment: Decentralized workflows allowed each location to operate with autonomy, but this made it challenging to enforce uniform procurement policies and ensure enterprise-wide compliance.
- Visibility Into Strategic Insights: While transactional data existed, consolidating and analyzing sourcing activity and spend proved time-consuming, limiting the team’s ability to extract actionable insights.
- Supplier Collaboration Potential: Without a centralized platform, supplier interactions were managed individually across sites, which created inconsistencies in engagement and made it harder to fully leverage supplier partnerships.
These priorities sat atop fundamental savings goals. The ideal solution would seamlessly integrate with SAP and create a frictionless experience for buyers, enabling them to optimize purchases with minimal effort.
Understanding the advantages of partnering with a provider that could work in tandem with their existing systems, they turned to Fairmarkit. Together, they began the transformation of the organization's procurement function that not only resolved volume and visibility issues but also set a new benchmark for automation in enterprise procurement.
Selecting and implementing Fairmarkit
While long-term goals centered on process improvement, the initial partnership with Fairmarkit began as a one-year pilot focused on tail spend savings. Results came quickly. During the first eight months, Fairmarkit delivered nearly $1M in awarded savings inside a limited scope.
Seeing that their savings goals would be met with ease, the company shifted its focus to using Fairmarkit to drive operational efficiency and scalability.
The partnership evolved beyond cost reduction to become foundational to the procurement function itself: enhancing processes, boosting compliance, and shifting operations toward strategic, scalable sourcing.
Fairmarkit’s key capabilities included:
- Autonomous Sourcing at Scale: Fairmarkit’s demand-to-award product suite automated the full RFx cycle using advanced AI, cutting cycle times and enabling many events to run entirely autonomously.
- Intuitive User Experience: Fairmarkit’s user-friendly design, shaped by real-world input from dozens of leading procurement teams, led to fast platform adoption among users.
- End-to-End Compliance and Risk Management: With tools like KIT, Fairmarkit’s end-to-end AI assistant, the team gained built-in compliance guardrails for approvals, supplier selections, and contract terms.
- Comprehensive Analytics: With Fairmarkit’s analytics suite, they gained new visibility into the entire procurement cycle, including previously unmanaged spend, allowing real-time insights that improved performance.
The two organizations, both driven by cultures of innovation and collaboration, worked together to effectively navigate change management and global implementation:
- Trusted Partnership and White Glove Service: Fairmarkit worked closely with the customer’s team on an implementation plan that included defined milestones, tailored training, supplier communication, and hands-on support.
- Seamless Integration: Fairmarkit integrated smoothly into existing SAP ECC workflows, minimizing disruption and optimizing current systems.
Change Management Support: Backed by strong executive sponsorship, the team managed adoption through a phased rollout, testing automation features like auto-send before wider deployment.
Results
What started as an initiative to gain visibility into unmanaged spend soon evolved into transforming and scaling their entire procurement function. In partnership with Fairmarkit, the organization was able to:
- Increase Efficiency at Scale: Average event creation-to-open time dropped more than 50%, while time to award dropped by 55%. More than 50,000 events have been run completely autonomously, with no human intervention.
- Elevated Savings: The team has achieved ~$15M in savings from automated events alone, based on ~$285M in baseline spend. Notably, the overwhelming majority of this spend is completely automated
- Improve Supplier Engagement: Automation gave buyers more time to focus on higher-value work, which improved performance even in manual events, reducing average open time by 13% and award time by 46%. Buyers have seen faster turnaround, stronger supplier participation, and better sourcing outcomes.
The procurement function now operates with the scalable sourcing process it desired. Team members are now working in a more strategic capacity, with Fairmarkit’s automation tools freeing up time by cutting down on manual tasks. The added benefits of better compliance and real-time insight into spending have helped tighten control, bring consistency and expand influence across sourcing efforts worldwide. With smoother workflows and stronger ties to suppliers, the team has extended its reach into new sourcing areas, regions, and categories.
Looking Ahead
Fairmarkit and this global manufacturing leader are committed to deepening their partnership, rolling out the platform across more plants and into new regions. Together, they aim to set the bar for procurement automation as a whole, expanding advanced offerings like auto-send on a greater scale and beginning work with auto-award capabilities.
Their collective vision encompasses strategic, tactical and tail spend, from demand to award. The company plans to use Fairmarkit to transform their RFP process in the same way they’ve done with RFQ. They have potential to reimagine their intake processes as well, using KIT to engage requesters across multiple business functions, where creating a fully-compliant request takes seconds and requires nothing more than a mobile photo.
By fully leveraging AI and automation, this manufacturing leader is building a procurement model rooted in clarity, agility, and strategic foresight. As their partnership with Fairmarkit continues to evolve, the company isn't just adapting to new technology, but shaping it. The two entities are working side by side to grow together, creating an upward spiral that cycles between user feedback and creating the next generation of the Fairmarkit platform.
