The company
In 2024, the company’s global spend on goods and services exceeded $50B. Their operating model is built for complexity: hundreds of independently running business units supported by a semi-centralized shared services team.
That structure enables speed and autonomy, but also creates variation in tools, processes, and sourcing maturity. At their scale, procurement needed a platform that could flex across categories and teams while creating structure and repeatability across strategic, tactical, and tail spend.
The challenge
As sourcing activity grew, the organization faced recurring obstacles:
- Fragmented execution: Business units ran sourcing independently with inconsistent processes.
- Limited visibility: Siloed activity made it difficult to aggregate outcomes or measure savings consistently.
- Tool sprawl: Different teams used different tools and ad hoc workflows, slowing cycle time and standardization.
- Maturity gaps: Some teams had never run an RFP, creating risk, friction, and uneven results.
They also had two distinct motions to support:
- A handful of very large, strategic RFPs responsible for most spend and savings.
- A high-volume RFQ program built for speed and efficiency, generating significant supplier engagement.
Selecting and implementing Fairmarkit
The company began working with Fairmarkit in 2022 to reduce cycle times and improve visibility into sourcing activity and savings. Fairmarkit stood out for three reasons:
- A single platform for strategic + tactical sourcing: supporting both complex RFPs and scalable RFQs.
- Business-unit empowerment with governance: teams can run events independently while leaders retain oversight and reporting.
- In-house sourcing expertise: Fairmarkit’s customer success team offered hands-on demos, workshops and coaching for cross-functional business units.
As adoption expanded, they broadened their usage of the Fairmarkit’s agentic AI product suite to expand across the procurement lifecycle:
- GenAI Demand Intake
- Autonomous Sourcing with RFQs
- AI-Enabled RFPs
- Reverse auction
- Scope of Work Agents
- Bid Analysis and Evaluation Agents
Results
Fairmarkit provided the foundation for a new generation of procurement: AI-powered and agentic workflows that could guide users through demand intake, event creation, supplier engagement, and evaluation and scoring, turning inconsistent sourcing motions into a standardized, scalable operating model.
- Double-digit record savings across RFPs and RFQs
- >500 proposals submitted across RFPs
- Nearly 200% increase in supplier responses YOY
- Sky-high net promoter score (NPS) of ~50, providing critical relief to the procurement technology space where scores are often below zero
More than 700 users across hundreds of business units took to Fairmarkit quickly and easily, driven by speed, intuitiveness and transparency:
- Centralized reporting through Fairmarkit’s API enabled PowerBI dashboards for enterprise-level spend visibility
- Business units became more autonomous, reducing reliance on central teams and speeding sourcing cycles
Looking Ahead
Building on adoption across strategic and tactical sourcing, the organization is expanding how it uses AI and agentic workflows to move faster and make better decisions. Focus areas include:
- Broader Agentic AI utilization: faster Scope of Work creation, advanced RFx creation, autonomous negotiations, improved analysis, and scenario-driven decision support
- Expanded adoption across business units: increasing coverage and capturing more value without adding headcount
- Deeper workflow standardization: strengthening repeatability across categories, teams, and spend levels
