“Don’t run with the turkeys at night if you want to soar with the eagles in the morning.” That’s what Fairmarkit CEO Kevin Frechette remembers as his dad’s mantra when he was growing up. Today, it imbues the company’s philosophy, as well as explaining the concept behind its eagle logo. And it encapsulates the can-do attitude that led Kevin and co-founder Tarek Alaruri to quit their jobs and start Fairmarkit in 2017, with more belief and confidence than customers or funding. Yet only a few years later, it's Autonomous Sourcing platform commands a top spot on SAP Store and is in use by enterprise customers around the globe like BP and Boeing.

 

But Kevin will be the first to tell you that the best story about Fairmarkit is not the first few months after the two embarked on their entrepreneurial journey. And it’s not about how he and Tarek quickly found Victor Kushch, their third co-founder (now CTO), or how they developed their idea, or even their “aha” moment. The best part of the story, he maintains, is about the past few years, the team and company culture they developed, and the customers who are benefiting from their solution.

 

Optimizing procurement with artificial intelligence

 

Let’s start with customers and benefits. Most Fairmarkit customers are enterprises that use SAP or SAP Ariba software for their procurement processes, Kevin told me, and to which the Fairmarkit platform seamlessly integrates with. This integration augments the enterprise software by providing insight into expenditures outside large contractual purchases – the “tail spend.” (Tail spend refers to one-off purchases, non-complex products and services, or smaller, infrequent purchases that aren’t included in catalogs, he explained.) Typically, these purchases are not systematically managed, and they involve significant manual data entry. Depending on the company, tail spend might amount to 20% of overall purchasing – and a lot of money.

 

The Fairmarkit platform applies artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle tail spend by bringing automated decision support into the process – in other words, helping procurement teams do their jobs better and faster. For example, the solution helps find the best suppliers for requests and automatically collects competitive quotes from the existing supplier base and the broader marketplace. It can even approve and update a purchase request with the new price and supplier. Meanwhile, procurement teams get insight into spend history and patterns, with analysis of supplier performance and recommendations for improving and meeting service-level agreements. Fairmarkit continues to partner with innovative customers to explore additional opportunities for AI-augmented workflows. One such use case is using Generative AI for demand intake and arming business requesters with a tool to request goods & services, route it through the organization's policies, and go from intake to sourced event without static forms or phone calls to procurement. Compliance is of course a key element, enabling companies to meet goals for responsible business practices.

 

Along the way, Fairmarkit customers are cutting costs without cutting jobs. “AI requires human involvement and oversight, like any other technology,” Kevin noted, “as well as a feedback loop for continuous improvement.”

 

Helping companies go digital with a talented team

 

He also recognizes that, for many companies, digitalization is not easy. That’s where his team comes in. Since 2017, the Fairmarkit team has grown to more than 100 “rock stars” – people who are skilled at understanding each customer’s journey toward digitalization and helping them make the transition at their own pace.

 

So how has Fairmarkit grown and scaled so quickly? I was fascinated to learn that not one of the co-founders had a background in procurement. Otherwise, “we would not have come to the same conclusions,” Kevin said. “It blew our minds that there was so little process transparency or optimization.” They quickly learned that the procurement community is quite tightly knit, and the word about Fairmarkit spread quickly. Collaborating with SAP account executives helped, too. By 2018, Fairmarkit had landed funding from top investors and began to appear on “fastest-growing company” lists. The three leaders set about building a top-notch organization committed to diversity and inclusiveness, recognizing that, like that of any healthy organization, the culture would evolve over time.

 

With that evolution comes Fairmarkit’s move toward building generative AI into the product to bring even more intelligence into the decision-support functionality. That evolution will likely be accelerated by a recently announced partnership with Amazon Business, whereby Fairmarkit's Autonomous Sourcing platform can be integrated into a customer’s Amazon Business account. This way, users can request quotations directly from Amazon Business, eliminating manual search.

 

Meanwhile, Fairmarkit has solidified its informal relationship with SAP with a formal partnership, certified integration, visibility at SAP events, and inclusion on SAP Store. All that has resulted in multiple sales in just a few months. I am impressed with how high these eagles have soared.

 

Visit SAP Store to learn more about automated sourcing with Fairmarkit.