KES/Arkestro Customer Story
Overview
Koch Engineered Solutions (KES) provides process and pollution control equipment and digital technologies for the industrial and energy sectors. Operating at global scale, the company manages hundreds of supplier relationships across its suite of offerings.
Company
Koch Engineered Solutions
Challenge
Improve the efficiency and holistic effectiveness of the procurement process for KES, their suppliers, and customers.
Infor Solution
Infor’s centralized, cloud-based ERP and Arkestro’s AI workflow platform together handle predictive procurement and supplier communication.
Outcome
Challenge
As a global enterprise, procurement is a critical driver of KES’s success. Their process and energy management solutions are complex and resource-intensive, which means their procurement process is as well. Their ability to source competitively priced, high-quality materials directly impacts their ability to deliver solutions on time, on budget, and at the quality their customers expect. To do that, KES employees must simultaneously compare and negotiate multiple possible outcomes across their supplier base before making a selection.
But KES’s on-premise legacy systems made it difficult to stay market competitive. Every time KES had to reach a decision about a supplier, employees had to manually cross-check every possible supplier
configuration. This was true whether they were supporting a single spot buy or a more elaborate, enterprise-scale sourcing project. Because their on-prem systems weren’t integrated, procurement teams often duplicated work across their platforms, leading to delays and unexpected costs. Suppliers also had to provide quotes item by item, resulting in even more valuable time spent entering data.
The opportunity was clear. If KES could unify its systems and automate its processes, it could free its teams to focus on strategic, value-adding work rather than repetitive tasks and stay market competitive with strong supplier relationships.
As a global enterprise, procurement is a critical driver of KES’s success. Their process and energy management solutions are complex and resource-intensive, which means their procurement process is as well. Their ability to source competitively priced, high-quality materials directly impacts their ability to deliver solutions on time, on budget, and at the quality their customers expect. To do that, KES employees must simultaneously compare and negotiate multiple possible outcomes across their supplier base before making a selection.
But KES’s on-premise legacy systems made it difficult to stay market competitive. Every time KES had to reach a decision about a supplier, employees had to manually cross-check every possible supplier configuration. This was true whether they were supporting a single spot buy or a more elaborate, enterprise-scale sourcing project. Because their on-prem systems weren’t integrated, procurement teams often duplicated work across their platforms, leading to delays and unexpected costs. Suppliers also had to provide quotes item by item, resulting in even more valuable time spent entering data.
The opportunity was clear. If KES could unify its systems and automate its processes, it could free its teams to focus on strategic, value-adding work rather than repetitive tasks and stay market competitive with strong supplier relationships.
Infor Solution
As a global enterprise, procurement is a critical driver of KES’s success. Their process and energy management solutions are complex and resource-intensive, which means their procurement process is as well. Their ability to source competitively priced, high-quality materials directly impacts their ability to deliver solutions on time, on budget, and at the quality their customers expect. To do that, KES employees must simultaneously compare and negotiate multiple possible outcomes across their supplier base before making a selection.
But KES’s on-premise legacy systems made it difficult to stay market competitive. Every time KES had to reach a decision about a supplier, employees had to manually cross-check every possible supplier
Having cloud-based software where it’s easy to link edge systems back and forth is really, really powerful. It allows us to do plug and play operations.
MICHAEL NOVELLO
VP of Global Supply Chain
KES
Infor and Arkestro’s joint approach to optimizing KES’s procurement processes was key to KES’s ultimate success. Because Arkestro and Infor are integrated platforms, winning offers and relevant supplier data flow seamlessly from Arkestro into Infor’s approval process and ultimately integrate directly within the KES general ledger. Together, the Infor and Arkestro teams approached this work for KES not as an IT project, but as a business enablement exercise to drive concrete return on investment (ROI) and short-term profit and loss (P&L) impact. This approach demonstrated the team’s understanding of KES’s business opportunities and signaled to employees that the solution was designed to make their work easier, leading to speedy and enthusiastic adoption.
Outcome
Driving speed and efficiency across the organization
System integration
Reduced manual work
Data-driven, intelligent quoting
System integration
Infor’s out-of-the-box approach allowed KES to seamlessly activate Arkestro and unify over 20 different ERP systems worldwide into a single, cloud-based platform. This consolidation not only maximized efficiencies across the procurement process, but gave the company full visibility across its global operations, eliminating the inefficiencies of moving data back and forth between disconnected systems and regions. Today, KES’s procurement data flows seamlessly between Infor and Arkestro, enabling a feedback loop that streamlines the process of analyzing, comparing, and negotiating quotes within the purchase order approval processes. This has simplified many key business functions like demand communication, quote analysis, negotiation, approval, and purchase order (PO) creation, all while reducing manual handoffs and ensuring information stays accurate and up to date. The result is a smoother, more connected operation that scales effortlessly across KES’s global footprint and maximizes value – not just for KES, but for its suppliers and customers as well.
Reduces manual work
Infor and Arkestro together enabled new opportunities for automation, saving time and reducing manual data entry, decision fatigue, and one-at-a-time process flows. This new system has cut both account setup and data entry times in half, eliminating the need for spreadsheet-based or manual processes. Beyond the clear and tangible benefit of time savings, Infor and Arkestro’s joint solution has also lifted a mental weight from KES employees’ shoulders. They know now that these once tedious tasks are lighter and faster to complete, freeing them up to take on more work without feeling stretched thin. Today, KES is scaling these benefits across its organization, simultaneously elevating employee experience and productivity.
What made a big difference for us was actually making sure that we didn’t treat it like an IT project and treated it like a business enablement project.
MICHAEL NOVELLO
VP of Global Supply Chain
KES
Data-driven, intelligent quoting
Infor CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise and Arkestro have also made KES’s procurement process more efficient and cost-effective. Because suppliers can access more real-time personalized information throughout procurement (with AI-assisted recommended quotes that live seamlessly in existing supplier email-based workflows), they can get to best and final offers faster and more effectively, and with greater intentionality and confidence about the outcome. This agility has been especially valuable during supply chain disruptions, when Arkestro’s adaptive model enables all parties to update and refine offers in real time based on changing market realities. Projects can keep moving without delays.
Modernizing procurement with Infor
Learn more: https://www.infor.com/en-gb/solutions/erp
About Infor
Infor is a global leader in business cloud software products for companies in industry-specific markets. Infor builds complete industry suites in the cloud and efficiently deploys technology that puts the user experience first, leverages data science, and integrates easily into existing systems. Over 67,000 organizations worldwide rely on Infor to help overcome market disruptions and achieve business-wide digital transformation (infor.com).
About Arkestro
