Global manufacturing firm DS Smith is a leading provider of sustainable packaging solutions, paper products and recycling services. The company sought an improved way to manage their procurement spend to help them drive efficiency and cost management. It worked with Exponentia.ai and AWS to build a cloud-based solution that provides more transparency on procurement spend and single source of truth that builds trust in data.

Before developing the procurement spend analytics solution on AWS, the team dedicated as much as 60% of their time to manual tasks, such as mapping spending with categories. The challenge was magnified by the complexity of integrating and extracting data from multiple SAP systems. This process hindered their ability to concentrate on initiatives like gaining a 360-degree view of vendors, which could have offered deeper insights into vendor profiles and expenditures.‍

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Exponentia supported DS Smith through a digital transformation initiative focused on introducing automation, providing spend visibility and managing change. Exponentia used various AWS services to first build patterns to extract data in real-time from all relevant systems and then define quality and mapping rules as part of an automated pipeline that produced analytics ready data without any manual intervention.

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Procurement team now has access to real-time insights and more visibility to better manage their procurement operations. Procurement managers can see the various kinds of spends and run analysis like supplier rationalisation, price arbitrage, spend vs contract rate deviation, payment terms optimisation for optimal working capital, and high volume procurements. They can easily build new use cases as the unified platform built on AWS allows them that kind of flexibility. The teamwork between DS Smith, Exponentia.ai and AWS has what truly made a difference in helping drive this change.

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