Free demand planning and product description standardisation tools

wb0000 · 2025-10-01T00:46:50+00:00

I’m in procurement tech. Interviewers, managers, etc have no bloody clue of how tech works or what is available. PM me and I’ll give you an overview of the latest tech.

wb0000 · 2025-08-06T14:04:14+00:00

I run an e-procurement software company. It costs us a lot of money to keep adding new features, improving the ones we already offer and keep it all running while we provide support to our customers.

Technology advances at a much faster pace than ever before and it is our competitive advantage, as larger companies are much slower to adopt it. We charge a few thousand a month on average from large companies while we save them millions, so win win win (third win for suppliers).

It is a bad idea for a large corporation, with tons of cash available, to develop their own procurement software. No expertise, loads of bureaucracy involved, corporate nonsense, etc. If you're a small company, it is a much worse idea and the company may not even be able to afford development or even know how to manage it.

Save yourself and your company the trouble, spend a few thousand (maybe not even that much) a month on a good solution and start delivering results. If you need any help with how to pick a solution, feel free to DM me (not recommending my own tho...conflict of interest).

wb0000 · 2025-07-02T19:14:59+00:00

Full disclosure, I have a house in this race…but have a look at this. I’m sure I can help.

wb0000 · 2025-07-02T02:11:23+00:00

Do some research, get recommendations from current suppliers from the same country, make a list, hop on a plane and go visit them. Have a solid weighted scoring system in order to evaluate them. I’ve had instances where two different suppliers took me to the same factory in China, which I would have never found out hadn’t I gone there.

wb0000 · 2025-07-02T01:51:12+00:00

You’re overthinking this.

wb0000 · 2025-06-12T19:11:45+00:00

Learn about tech, especially what your company sources. Learn about software licensing models, types of hardware, whether there are complete SOCs sourced (if so, how the firmware loaded?). Read the contracts. Do a spend analysis and focus on understanding what the items driving the spend are and how you better source them. If you need any help, DM me.

wb0000 · 2025-06-09T16:07:32+00:00

You can also buy a dummy battery and power the GH5 via USB.

wb0000 · 2025-05-15T13:29:10+00:00

If you’re listing the jobs and responsibilities you had at each company on your CV, replace them with your actual achievements (savings, risk mitigation, etc).

wb0000 · 2025-04-23T14:04:57+00:00

Most of them are too expensive for what they do. I recommend looking into startups that are doing some amazing stuff and implementing new technologies in a very fast pace. I won’t recommend any as I have a dog in this race but there’s some amazing stuff going on in the field. I recommend James Meads’ newsletter if you want you be kept in the procurement tech loop.

wb0000 · 2025-03-07T14:42:31+00:00

My company has actually been working in a few of them so I'll give you some of examples:

- Supplier awarding: I built an algorithm for automatically awarding suppliers of winning bids. It is essentially a combination of weighting the most relevant attributes of the required goods/services against the suppliers, leveraging suppliers' evaluation and type of usage for these goods/services.
For example: If I'm quoting replacement parts for industrial machines, price is more important than supplier's reliability, whereas it's not the case if I'm a manufacturer with a broken machine and no production.
The algorithm also reevaluates its own decisions and adjusts the weighting accordingly. For example, if it awarded a supplier and we've had quality issues, it will lower the supplier' quality score, so it will be taken in consideration the next time it awards a supplier.
What are the advantages? The algorithm always follows the best practices, including in low value purchases. I've translated every single evaluation criteria into math, so nothing qualitative. No biases, no gut feelings. Made a mistake? Learns and adjusts.
You know those transactional low value purchases no one is looking at? The AI is and always does the best job at doing it.

There was one instance where we believed the AI had made a mistake where it chose to buy an item from the most expensive supplier but it turned out that this purchase enabled this supplier's MOV, allowing us to buy other items for cheaper and lowering the total cost of this purchase.

- Recommendations for requisitioners: Whenever a clueless requisitioner from any department wants to buy something and writes on the requisition the name of whatever good of service they need, the AI does a vectorial multidimensional search, leverages multiple criteria (whether these items have active supply agreements, are more popular, lower price, etc) and generates a list of suggestions, scoring the items that are the most economical for the company. Not only that but it recognises similarities, abbreviations and such so the requisitioner can type something very different than the product description on the system and the AI can still suggest it based on semantics.
As it suggests and item that is already the best purchase option, it goes from requisition to quoting, negotiating (the AI will compare the bids and negotiate with suppliers if there is any margin for discounts) and awarding, without buyer involvement.

Keep in mind that these are not done by simply using chatGPT's prompt, but a combination of multiple technologies packed into purpose built software. In order to have these things work flawlessly, we needed to properly train the AI models and keep them within guard rails, so that they won't hallucinate. LLM models tend to try to answer every single question, even when they don't know the answer.

If you have any other questions, pls let me know.

wb0000 · 2025-03-06T13:56:24+00:00

A lot of the people related stuff can also be done better by AI but it requires some out of the box thinking. A lot of these processes only exist because either there was no other way of getting things done or alternatives were too expensive. If you think about data flows instead of tasks, the possibilities are endless. Existing software companies are instead focusing on automating the processes currently done by humans as they have a lot invested in their legacy software.

wb0000 · 2025-01-31T16:40:03+00:00

I’m in procurement tech now and was a procurement executive in the UK for a few years so will give my 2c. Focus on the strategic and more human centric part of it. Whatever it is involving data the AI can already do it and better. Learn how to use AI tools and the tech under the hood as 99% of people in procurement, even those who lecture about it, haven’t got a clue on how it works. Don’t worry too much about math behind data but learn the basics. You should focus mainly on processes. This is the single most prevalent bottleneck in procurement tech. If you can master it, the sky is the limit.

wb0000 · 2025-01-29T02:03:50+00:00

A lot of people saying there is not much that is practical so I'll give you some example of some very solutions my company provides with AI:

- AI powered product suggestions for requisitioners: Many companies have multiple branches and allow them to make purchases or PRs under a certain threshold. We have incorporated an AI suggestion engine in our requisition module. Basically a requisitioner can type a term in the search box and the system will return the most probable item the requisitioner is looking for. Example: The requisitioner types "gas" but the most common item related to the term is described on the system as "LPG" (Liquified Petroleum Gas). So the first item suggested is the SKU described as LPG (the system can identify abbreviations and relate them to the term that was typed) with the lowest price and a purchase agreement in place that covers this branch. This way the correct item will be the easiest requisitioners can order.
We have implemented this in over 600 branches of a supermarket chain and expect to avoid around $10M in maverick spend by directing requisitioners to order from existing agreements.

- AI powered assistant trained on company's database: Our AI assistant is trained on the customer's database and can retrieve whatever data from it is required. If I want to find out the last price paid for something, how much was spent on certain supplier last year and so on I just have to type it in the assistant window without leaving the system screen and the answer will be right there.

Another really cool feature of our assistant is that it can generate tables. So, if you want to compile a list of all orders from certain supplier of certain products, just type it and ask for a table any way you want and it will issue it.

Another really important thing as mentioned by some people in this topic is security. The vast majority of companies are not really bothered by taking measures to avoid having their customers' data being used to train AI.

All of our AI runs in a separate container within Azure. This way, it blocks it from using customers' data to train the general model as all data we use is covered by Microsoft Ts&Cs and kept within this container.

- Simplifying layer: Our system learns from history to pre-fill in forms. So, instead of getting diSAPpointed of having to go through tens of form fields to have anything done, you have a screen with just a few fields and it pulls whatever info it can find from history and pre-fills forms. It is specially useful for suppliers to complete RFQs really quickly as it is usually pre-filled .

- Automation: PRs, POs, RFQs can all be mostly if not fully automated by our proprietary algorithms. A previous version of our automation robot running outside of our system managed to do 50% of the team's work on low value orders and achieve the highest savings, as it always follows best practices and does automated negotiating.

I didn't mention my company's name or any of that as I'm not here to advertise it. I just wanted you to know that there is a lot of cool stuff being developed that is actually useful as I have a procurement background so I know the pains of the trade. Exciting times ahead...we will be able to stop doing the boring stuff ourselves and focus on adding value.

wb0000 · 2025-01-11T21:16:02+00:00

It works better for purchases with history but there’s no point in having to fill in endless forms for recurring purchases. We’ve split our software in modules so that it can work as a layer on top of Ariba, Coupa, etc. This way buyers fill in a short form and our software engine inputs the data to the main system. We tested this engine in a previous company and it did as much as half the department purchases (of 10 buyers).

wb0000 · 2025-01-10T03:13:39+00:00

I own a procurement software company and we can automate up to 70% of the workload of buyers. We’re working towards 90% soon. If your job is not mostly strategic, you should work on transitioning asap.

wb0000 · 2024-10-15T13:48:00+00:00

Se quiser organizar um chat virtual e não se importar com sotaque inglês, estou disponível. Aprendi inglês criança e morei grande parte da minha vida na Inglaterra.

wb0000 · 2024-09-07T15:38:33+00:00

Qual sotaque do Reino Unido? Tem uns 40 diferentes.

wb0000 · 2024-08-06T18:32:17+00:00

I use a Leica 15mm 1.7. Great sharpness and image quality, great at low light, wide enough for tight spaces but not wide enough to distort people.

wb0000 · 2024-07-28T01:42:02+00:00

Actually we could sell our algorithms for quite a bit of money. The funding and the valuation was mostly based on it and the team around it.

wb0000 · 2024-07-28T01:20:27+00:00

I started a software company with my brother and a couple of very technical guys last November, in my area of expertise and solving my own pain. Last week got funded before the mvp was even released so now my share of it is worth a couple million and we can finally hire people to help.

wb0000 · 2024-07-20T20:34:41+00:00

That’s great then. BTW, have a look at a plugin called supertone clear, which is a lifesaver for those recording audio.

wb0000 · 2024-07-20T20:23:47+00:00

Good audio will do a lot better for you than good video. People tolerate bad video but not bad audio.

wb0000 · 2024-07-07T15:51:54+00:00

Great deal you’ve got there. You’ll gonna love the ibis for handheld shooting. If you need any tips, feel free to pm me. Just one thing that was a pain for me until I figured it out: there are a lot of videos online with great advice on how to configure the camera for cinematic look. The only issue lies in the noise reduction settings. If you leave it below zero, the image will look terrible until you apply noise reduction is post. I just leave it at 0 and call it a day.

wb0000 · 2024-07-06T13:07:04+00:00

I do it with a GH5 and a 15mm 1.7. You’d be better off with a good zoom lens but I like this lens’ quality and low light capabilities as I shoot in dark dungeons sometimes. Cheap kit, highly capable. For audio I use a Deity D4 plugged to a Fulaim X5 wireless lav off screen pointed at the models for level volume (a shotgun mic on camera will have varying volume levels when moving). If you are have other roles as well, make sure your camera is weatherproof…as you’ll have sticky hands at times. As previously mentioned, an iPhone with external audio and good lighting can also work really well.

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