Intake and Orchestration in procurement: How do the solution providers define its role? – Aera Technology

Spend Matters continues its focus on Intake and Orchestration as this quarter’s theme of special interest with a viewpoint on the importance of this market segment from Alison Crawford, Senior Director of Global Product Marketing, Aera Technology.

If you’d like to understand more about what it means for procurement, read our Guide to Intake and Orchestration here.

What was the gap in the market and the business need that Aera intended to fulfil?

“Aera Technology, the Decision Intelligence company, was created to empower global enterprises to make smarter, faster decisions. Our AI platform for decision automation, Aera Decision Cloud™, seamlessly integrates with existing systems and data sources to automate and scale decision making with accuracy and speed, addressing a recognized need that plagues large, complex organizations. Known for its proven, exceptional performance and value generation, Aera is the trusted choice of market leaders in consumer products, life sciences, chemicals and industrial, technology and more.“Developed on the Aera Decision Cloud™, Aera Skills™ understands a customer’s specific set of business problems, makes real-time recommendations, takes actions autonomously, and learns from every decision made. Skills can be quickly configured for unique decision-making requirements. Skills can be leveraged across the enterprise, and most customers initially deploy supply chain-focused Skills (inventory, demand, logistics, order, and more). Procurement is a natural extension of the same digital decision-making capabilities and is a growing domain for Aera Technology. Customers are adopting the Aera Decision Cloud to make better and faster decisions across myriad functions, including procurement, to increase transparency, cost control, reduce risk and operational efficiency.”

Why does procurement (and business) need this extra layer of tech?

“While existing niche solutions provide sufficient functionality, they are siloed and unable to provide the functionality required to execute end-to-end decision making, a capability that is rapidly becoming a competitive requirement. Aera Decision Cloud™ is an AI-powered SaaS Decision Intelligence platform that dynamically integrates with the customer’s environment to deliver decision agility across the entire enterprise. Through this application, Aera delivers high-level recommendations of actions that optimize business objectives against complex, interrelated constraints and real-time data. Aera becomes a virtual member of the customer’s team, acting like a trained digital analyst to deliver well-researched and informed business recommendations, and taking action autonomously once a decision has been made. Aera learns from every decision and its outcome, thus improving future recommendations.

“Outcomes vary by skill, but customers have reported achieving results such as:

• ‘We will automate 63% of the total contract manufacturing organization team’s manual transactional processes. We will also introduce writebacks from Aera into SAP, which was a huge advancement. The 63% of transactions that are being automated … spans everything from planning to confirmations, administration, and reporting.’
• ‘I’m excited to say at this point, we’ve got greater than a 90% acceptance rate around these decisions … we can now start to take this innovation capability that’s helped to accelerate our journey and apply it to other product categories.’”

Analyse the vendor

Read our full analysis of Aera’s solution in this Vendor Analysis, part of our members’ subscription service.

Get help

You can engage Spend Matters to help you find your best-fit solution (including a current assessment of your organization, RFx and selection advisory).

Learn more

To know more about the technology, watch a recording of our webinar, “Demystifying Intake and Orchestration in Procurement.” Our analysts define what Intake and Orchestration technologies are, showcase use cases and explain how investing in these technologies could benefit your business.