business maxim. because as the logic goes, every euro that you don’t spend lands on the bottom profit lies in purchasing, at least according to the systems at heraeus often made it impossible to line. “in the past, the decentralized structure and heraeus | magazine 2016 13 supplier, who had previously supplied heraeus using a decentralized approach. “where we were once an insignif- icant medium-sized customer at ten different sites, we are now considered a global key account,” rieger enthuses. another colleague was able to use to the data to rene- gotiate the global agreements with headhunters and to see where we were spending money,” says monique rieger, purchasing manager of heraeus precious metals (hpm). efficiently bundle part-time staffing companies in germany. she also has global responsibility for purchasing chemical “by integrating the data, we can finally see where it products. even today, there are over 14 different purchasing makes sense to meet with the suppliers and to work out systems in use at over 100 sites within heraeus. in addition, a better deal for heraeus.” the point is not always to get each global business unit (gbu) uses its own product lower prices or more service: “because we work in some groups, descriptions and serial numbers for the individual industries with very few highly specialized suppliers, products. “since the data was not compatible, it was security of supply plays a crucial role,” states witte. in the extremely difficult to get an overview of our purchasing future, buyers will be able to define much more effectively activities within the group. sometimes we were not even the number of suppliers we should be cooperating with in aware that different areas were buying the same product from certain industries or regions. the same supplier at different prices,” rieger recalls. this makes strategic decisions like joint selection of suppliers or artificial meets human intelligence joint purchasing in order to negotiate better terms difficult. better deals by using a wide range of data sources data. but that does not mean that we can do that without artificial intelligence makes it possible to integrate the human intelligence. “in the early stages, in particular, since 2014, heraeus has been working on harmonizing its the system frequently asked when it was unsure,” rieger it infrastructure and process landscape with the magellan reports. does the product description “automobile” always program. procurement systems are being standardized as refer to the company car – or could it sometimes be a well. yet the entire changeover will not be completed until promotional gift for eur 3.90? each human response is 2019. “too long, when you consider the savings – and translated into a rule that will be applied going forward other strategic advantages, too – we will lose during that when a similar situation arises. “our system generated time,” says dirk witte, chief procurement officer. over two million such rules in the first four weeks alone, only a fraction of those with human assistance.” working with the italian software specialist creatives, they introduced a solution in 2016 that can obtain an aston ishing in this way, the software will – in a manner of speaking amount of information from the existing data for heraeus – make itself redundant over the medium term. because buyers. state-of-the-art language technologies and artificial in addition to the daily strategic analyses carried out by intelligence make it possible for the system to combine the the buyers, it is also now being used to transfer data from data from all 14 systems currently in use – thus allowing the the 14 legacy systems into the new, single sap system. buyers to analyze it. what companies supply heraeus in a does that mean it is only a temporary solution, even if product group worldwide? do other gbus buy the same a highly intelligent one? in the words of dirk witte: product? what suppliers offer the highest discounts? “we “especially when it comes to acquiring new businesses, could already generate group-wide analyses after only a few which heraeus intends to do in the next few years, rapid weeks,” says rieger, “and use them to identify areas where integration of the procurement data and processes will we could negotiate more favorable terms.” be key. our tool would speed up the categorization of different types of data so that we could utilize advantages chemical products, for example: using the data, buyers quicker,” witte continues. “it just knows heraeus too were able to get significantly better terms with a global well already.”