Buying Assistant

Overview

The Buying Assistant helps procurement teams use AI to identify spend leakage, recommend optimal suppliers, and generate short names for catalog items. By automating analysis and delivering actionable recommendations, it optimizes spend, reduces manual effort, and streamlines catalog quality management, enrichment, and normalization—enabling faster, more consistent purchasing decisions and a better experience for buyers.

Tasks this assistant can help with:

• Enriching and normalizing catalog content
• Detecting purchase orders without contract assignment and providing recommendations to optimize spend
• Recommending and assigning optimal suppliers to purchase requisitions based on historical purchase data, supplier performance metrics, pricing trends, and contract details

Example use cases for this assistant:

• Catalog data quality management and normalization
• Acceleration of source-of-supply assignment
• Elimination of spend leakage and strengthening contract coverage
• Spend optimization

Benefits

Improved catalog management
Automate enrichment and validation of catalog data at upload, saving time and enhancing catalog quality without manual effort from catalog managers.

Consistent stocking of critical materials
Use self-directing AI that autonomously monitors potential supply gaps and assigns new sources of supply for standardized, frequently purchased materials.

Faster, more consistent sourcing decisions
Choose the right supplier quickly in day-to-day purchasing through automatic assessment of relevant criteria and clear, explainable recommendations.

Agents used by this assistant

Use the Buying Assistant to orchestrate specialized AI agents, including Joule Agents that apply SAP’s process expertise or custom agents you create.

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