Скачать или смотреть Levelpath Supplier Enrichment Enables Growth at Ace Hardware

My name is Fraz Baig. I'm the director of category management at Ace hardware. In my current role, my team's responsibility is to be able to support the indirect spend across all of Ace. And then my focus is also on the operations side of the house to be able to enable my category managers and the team to be able to enable the business growth for Ace.
The AI technology that's being built into the tool is such a is such a buzzword, but there's actual applications of AI which they're actually utilizing in the tool. And that feature set is going to continue to grow as well. What that enabled for us was our supplier enrichment. So we were able to provide a database of our suppliers um and very quickly uh get back uh enriched data around those suppliers. So that makes when we're searching for suppliers that provides you know what we need to be able to enable the growth and make the right decisions for Ace. Our distribution centers utilize Levelpath to submit their intake request within the tool and and then you know it flows within our process to the right folks and all along the way the stakeholders are able to see where their requests are within our system. It's become kind of a central portal for us as it relates to working with our distribution folks and making procurement easy for them. So it provides great visibility for us for the stakeholders. It's easy.
And the neat thing is our training team is utilizing Levelpath to train the new facility managers as well because the tool makes it real easy for them to engage with procurement and in the back end we work with we work with engineering and facilities to get them the support that the the facility requires. Folks that are new to the organization they have one place to go to be able to interact with indirect procurement with Copilot. Some of the neat features that we're utilizing today are just quick bids. So if we need to do a a quick bid for a widget, the AI can actually provide um a quick write up and questions. We provided a list of our suppliers to Levelpath and and very quickly they were able to enhance the data for us including competitors. So now when we're doing RFPs, not only do we know, you know, who we want to include as part of our current suppliers, but we understand the marketplace dynamic a bit better as well.
What Levelpath is doing is really building upon AI. They entered the marketplace just when AI was being commercialized and very quickly utilized AI and what they call the Hyperbridge layer which uses the best of you know ,if it's whether it's Open AI or others they use the best of breed within the foundational elements of what they're building. And the proof is in actually utilizing the tool and being able to see it and and so we're utilizing it today across supplier enrichment, we're utilizing it the Copilot feature within the tool set as well, and quick bids but the development is released every Wednesday and we see the impact that it's making within the tool. As a procurement professional, our jobs we wear many hats and so I think utilizing Levelpath, what that has allowed us to do is bring together the process for our stakeholders it's enabled build really good internal communication and the transparency and the visibility that it provides to the stakeholders uh they appreciate as well. And so you know having an orchestration layer across your systems today and bringing that all together under one view is where the industry is headed. What Levelpath allows us to do is focus on what matters which is driving the business forward.