Ardent Partners is a leading research and advisory firm that specializes in supply management. Ardent’s in-depth coverage includes market research, best practices, thought leadership and technology strategies and specific solution providers. Each year, the firm publishes multiple reports that guide procurement, finance, and more recently, HR departments through the solution selection or RFP process.
Ardent’s new “Solution Showcase on CPO Rising” series features solution providers, old and new, and seeks to unravel the latest market innovations through different provider briefings. Readers will be able to quickly understand the ‘showcased’ provider and how that can support and impact procurement and supply management operations.
Solution Showcase on CPO Rising: The Smart Cube
Procurement professionals are working in an age where market intelligence can be a competitive differentiator for the enterprise and its supply chain. Category management, for example, has been transformed from the days of pressuring suppliers on price to understanding the nuances of commodities and their associated suppliers. The total cost and supplier risk transparency is game-changing for chief procurement officers and their teams.
To bring this into sharper focus, the Ardent Partners team recently connected with Omer Abdullah, (Co-founder) and Prerna Dhawan (Chief Solutions Officer) of The Smart Cube, a services firm that is pioneering new intelligent sourcing strategies that can lead to better supply management including better risk management and greater savings. Abdullah and Dhawan gave an overview of the company, highlighting its core offerings and latest developments.
Combining Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence for Strategic Decision-making
Founded in 2003, The Smart Cube Company has evolved from a pure professional services firm to one that now offers a range of solutions that can support a procurement team’s sourcing and category management. A growing partner ecosystem is also helping take Smart Cube’s solutions to market and strengthening data capabilities within its offerings. In December 2022, Smart Cube was acquired by WNS, complementing Smart Cube with a broader collection of managed and advisory services.
Smart Cube’s solution enhancements cater to the increased complexity that procurement faces, such as market volatility, global operations, and interdependent supply chains, but also internal issues related to cost containment pressure and stakeholder expectations toward procurement. To combat the market visibility challenges that many procurement teams face which results in a lack of insight and intelligence for better decision-making, Smart Cube developed solutions to address that need and make its procurement clients more intelligent and a larger creator or value. It is the firm’s core view that to accomplish this goal, the procurement team must be insight led, opening doors to more strategic conversations and establishing a higher level of credibility. The Smart Cube developed three solutions to enable this.
Category Intelligence On-Demand
Smart Cube covers both direct and indirect categories for its customers, aiding with various use cases for procurement strategy development or review. For example, procurement is increasingly involved in new product development. What category intelligence does the CPO and their team need from a supply market or demand perspective? These are critical questions that Smart Cube can address. As the procurement team enters the sourcing and supplier negotiation stages, Smart Cube’s category intelligence can provide the necessary strategy execution insights for those phases. Lastly, the use of internal, external, and third-party data enables ongoing category management.
The intelligence data provided is consumed in a couple of ways. At the foundation is Smart Cube’s Amplifi PRO platform — an on-demand, self-serve dashboard. The intelligence is standardized for all clients seeking insights into category trends or emerging themes. Users simply access the platform and search for specific category information at their leisure. For more specific questions or hypotheses, such as driving a more competitive advantage, Smart Cube’s internal teams work directly with the client to formulate evidence-based intelligence that provides more credibility with stakeholders — particularly during negotiations.
Supplier Risk Intelligence Transparency
Today’s globally interconnected supply chains introduce a host of supply risks. Smart Cube’s supplier risk intelligence solution combines AI and human intelligence specialists, coupled with its Smart Risk platform, providing 360-degree continuous risk intelligence developing supplier risk scores based on up-to-date data and information.
Clients provide Smart Cube with a subset of suppliers deemed critical or strategic, including a view into supplier identification, country location, and category linkage. A number of risk parameters contribute to overall supplier risk scores, such as financial, operational, and performance risks. Internal supplier data within the client organization like late deliveries, payment defaults, and quality issues are combined with external data points to form a complete risk profile.
Smart Cube covers dozens of specific risk metrics and uses its own proprietary methodology and model from which supplier risk is calculated. Once risks are identified, Smart Cube specialists can assist with risk mitigation strategies, such as alternative sources of supply. A combination of Smart Cube’s online platform, email alerts, and application programming interfaces (APIs) make the information available on other supply chain platforms, like Coupa and JAGGAER — leveraging knowledge management capabilities.
Commodity Intelligence Insights
Commodity market volatility has remained constant since the pandemic, leading to continued uncertainty for category leaders. Thus, Smart Cube provides CPOs and their procurement teams with the commodity insights they need to navigate the nuances of various supply markets. A forecasting team builds commodity models as well as identifies underlying market drivers to determine ways procurement and category leaders can drive greater value in their commodity buying.
Smart Cube analysts examine commodity price data and market movement and put those into the context of a client’s spend and potential marketplace exposure. Analysts use commodity tools and simulated scenarios to provide an impact assessment for better client decision-making across raw material markets. The company’s AI + HI insights model helps its clients move up the value chain within the enterprise. Procurement can more effectively address market volatility and disruption, delivering more opportunities to the business.
Analyst Insight
Smart Cube’s solutions are powered and underpinned by the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology model as well as the human intelligence (HI) element of category, functional, and technical experts who leverage technology and provide bespoke custom insights for better decision-making. This combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence ensures a wide scope of data along with contextualized analysis for accurate and meaningful outcomes. In today’s “age of intelligence,” Smart Cube’s procurement services can deliver pre-built and custom intelligence reports that can enable a procurement team, in turn, to deliver greater insights to its stakeholders, make smart decisions, impact more spend, and better scale its own operations. While still less than a year under new management (WNS), Smart Cube’s executives are actively investing in its core offerings and appear genuinely optimistic about the longer-term promise of combining its offerings with that of other WNS divisions.
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CPO Rising Listicle: Five Benefits of Category Management
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