AI enabled procurement on ServiceNow at Knowledge 2021

About the event

After a year in which supply chains were tested as never before, chief procurement officers were asking how to keep their organizations agile and resilient. Knowledge 2021, ServiceNow's annual conference, held virtually from May 11, 2021, gave technical experts and business leaders a first look at digital workflow practices that help organizations grow and adapt.

Aavenir took part with sessions and live chats on source to pay and contract lifecycle management on ServiceNow. Procurement leaders at the time named data quality, poor integration between applications and limited funding as the main barriers to digital adoption. Our sessions focused on three challenges behind those barriers. This page is kept as a record of the event.

Challenge 1: no single version of the truth

Procurement data was spread across platforms, spreadsheets, slide decks and separate reporting tools, so leaders could not trust a single view of vendors, contracts and spend.

Our answer: centralize vendor, contract, sourcing and invoice data on ServiceNow. Many ServiceNow customers already held vendor and purchase data on the platform. With Aavenir's source to pay apps built natively on ServiceNow, they could bring requests for proposal, contracts and invoices together too, and use AI to capture data from existing contract and invoice documents.

Challenge 2: broken communication across teams and vendors

Procurement is a connected chain, from finding the right supplier to contract, order, receipt and payment. Business teams raising requests rarely see the steps and approvals involved, and procurement, contracts and accounts payable often cannot see whether a request is waiting on a supplier assessment, a negotiation, a signature or a manager's queue. Status lives in email threads.

Our answer: standardize and automate the workflow. ServiceNow gives every employee role based access to request and track procurement. Aavenir's apps route work across requisitions, sourcing, negotiation, purchasing, contracts, receipt and accounting, with automatic reminders and current status for everyone involved.

Challenge 3: procurement applications that do not connect

Digital transformation usually means making better use of existing systems, not replacing them. But separate applications create data silos, errors and a poor experience, for example when a vendor record, a contract and an invoice must all agree before a two way or three way match can approve payment.

Our answer: work better together with existing ServiceNow applications and enterprise systems. ServiceNow connects systems of record through prebuilt integration spokes, so RFPflow, Contractflow and Invoiceflow can exchange data with core systems such as Oracle, SAP, Ariba, Salesforce, Workday and DocuSign without custom code.

Our sessions at Knowledge 2021

• Managing the contract lifecycle on ServiceNow with AI and digital workflows
• A live chat with Aavenir on source to pay on ServiceNow

ServiceNow's own sessions that year covered its procurement service management and legal service delivery products. Today, Aavenir's apps form a contract intelligence platform with Avy and Aavenir Atlas, on ServiceNow or standalone. See Aavenir on ServiceNow.

About Aavenir

Aavenir is an enterprise contract intelligence platform for procurement, legal, IT, finance, and sales teams. Aavenir AI reads every agreement an enterprise has signed, Aavenir Atlas answers questions across the whole portfolio, and its apps act on contract terms from sourcing to payment, natively on ServiceNow or standalone. About Aavenir.