SIG Fall 2024 Global Executive Summit: Discover the Trends, Innovations, and Solutions Shaping High-Performance Procurement Teams
Arkestro was thrilled to attend the SIG 2024 Global Executive Summit on October 7-9 at Omni Rancho Las Palmas Resort in Rancho Mirage, California.
About the Summit
An information-packed three-day event, SIG’s Global Executive Summit is an invaluable opportunity for procurement leaders to learn from the industry’s top CPOs. Workshops, keynote sessions, CPO roundtables, and more covered procurement’s hottest topics, including:
- The latest best practices
- Cost-cutting strategies
- Innovative processes
- Risk-mitigation approaches
The event also included breakout sessions, solution demonstrations, and networking events, allowing attendees to discover the latest trends and connect with like-minded professionals facing similar challenges.
Arkestro’s notable attendees included:
- Edmund Zagorin: Founder and CSO
- Caroline Cioe: SVP of North American Sales
- Dale Burkett: Senior Account Executive
- Ryan Galvin: Sales Representative
About SIG
SIG (Sourcing Industry Group) is the premier global association for sourcing, procurement, and risk professionals. Founded in 1991, SIG provides thought leadership, networking, and training opportunities to executives in sourcing, procurement, and outsourcing from Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies.
In 2023, SIG appointed Arkestro founder and CSO Edmund Zagorin as a member of the SIG Advisory Board. In this position, Edmund helps ensure that procurement teams work with the highest quality data as the foundation for performing analysis, determining patterns, and predicting future outcomes.
The Agenda: Akrestro x Arm Case Study
The Arkestro x Arm summit session highlighted how to leverage AI and behavioral science to improve IT compliance and control spend:
During this session, Arkestro CSO and Founder Edmund Zagorin was joined by Arm Vice President Sean Park to discuss how Arkestro helped Arm use predictive procurement for IT governance.
Edmund and Sean explained how Arm was locked in with several existing suppliers for IT infrastructure spend. Arm wanted greater leverage for their demand to achieve greater compliance with payment terms and cost requirements across IT service spend.
To solve the challenge, Arm looked to Arkestro’s predictive procurement, a technique that embeds game theory and behavioral science to unlock the dramatic benefits of procedural optimization. Using predictive models, the company leveraged Arkestro’s Suggested Offers and Intelligent Feedback to expand governance and drive dramatic, CFO-recognized value.
“Arkestro has been a strategic and innovative partner for Arm,” said Sean Park, Vice President of Procurement and Transformation, Arm. “The level of dedication to our success has allowed us to drive significant impact at a high velocity enabling us to better contain and manage spend while ensuring procurement processes are compliant and scaling efficiently.”
The case study presentation shared insights on how to:
- Leverage predictive procurement for IT governance
- Use behavioral science to make IT governance the default outcome
- Use predictive AI for IT spend and unlocking compliance from competition
SIG Future of Sourcing Awards
SIG’s Global Executive Summit also included the 2024 Future of Sourcing Awards, which recognize individuals and organizations driving innovation, leadership, and transformation in categories critical to the sourcing industry.
Arkestro was excited to cheer on two of our customers who earned awards at the event, including a building materials manufacturer that won the Innovations in Sourcing category and Arm computing platforms, which won for Innovations in Governance.
Significant Savings for a Nation-Wide Building Materials Manufacturer
As a manufacturer with a North America-wide footprint, this Arkestro customer faced numerous challenges, including optimization of shipping routes, reducing costs, and ensuring timely deliveries across a vast geographic area. Arkestro assisted the US manufacturer by using predictive models to streamline logistics operations.
Exponential Savings
A few focused events were executed as a test to establish a high level of supplier (carrier) participation. In the end, this customer identified savings of 5-15% during a period where this part of the North American logistics market was up broadly by 3%.
Reduced Rates
Amazingly, the customer received bids representing reduced rates in every lane. In addition, the team was able to bid all lanes (roughly 4,000) across 22 plants with no incremental resources, allowing them to execute the project in less than a month.
Efficiency Gains
The automation of supplier communications across the event was a significant efficiency gain. The customer’s estimate of execution of a similar event without Arkestro was 660 hours. With Arkestro, the process took 25 hours.
The customer estimates future annual labor savings from a reduction in reliance on the spot market to be an additional 3,500 hours. Following the event, all updated rates (223K rates) were available for upload into the customer’s Transportation Management System for use by the Transportation Planning team.
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Arm: Transforming Procurement with New Technology
Several years ago, Arm initiated a significant cost-cutting initiative in preparation for going public. As a result, procurement was overwhelmed with volume and trying to keep stakeholders happy. Their role was more focused on keeping the lights on and less focused on optimizing results.
Leveraging PPO to Achieve Primary Objectives
Sean Park entered the picture with a relatively blank slate — and the realization that procurement needed to transform to help build a world-class organization. After baselining what the company had and where the gaps were, Sean partnered with Arkestro to help achieve four primary objectives for procurement transformation:
- Risk management
- Supplier experience + customer experience
- Positive financial impact
- Scalability
The Arkestro team quickly went to work with Arm, leveraging game theory and dynamic feedback to launch and complete a $10 million spot buy in just one week. Right away, Arm achieved 16% savings on a commodity product they had bought many times in the past.
Impacting More Spend
Arkestro’s PPO platform also helped Arm move from impacting 20% of spend to 60%. The tool helped the team identify new opportunities to gather benchmark data, negotiate with suppliers, and optimize spend across categories they previously didn’t have time to touch.
Today, Arm uses Arkestro for up to 80% of its supplier negotiations. The procurement team, suppliers, and stakeholders are all thrilled with the experience, leveraging the tool for greater speed, efficiency, and cost savings.
Get Results with Arkestro
Arkestro offers the opportunity to transform procurement and set your business up for success in a dynamic, ever-changing environment. Here are some of the ways our Predictive Procurement Orchestration platform is different from the competition:
- Automatic offers: By automatically suggesting offers to suppliers ahead of securing quotes, we steer negotiations based on a high-fidelity blend of supplier demand, historical and previous buying behavior.
- Line item-level sourcing: With our ability to provide input at the line-item level, you can get your arms around every nut and bolt of spend for the first time, greatly elevating procurement’s ability to influence outcomes, secure a market-competitive price every time, and stop leaving money on the table.
- Dynamic feedback: Through autonomous dynamic feedback we nudge suppliers throughout the process to give them a sense of how they are doing in the negotiation — and crucially what they need to do to win.
Ready to get immediate results with Arkestro? Contact us today to see how we can help you drive better buying decisions, faster and at scale.
