Raiven: Facilitating Smart Purchasing and Sourcing Decision-Making with AI

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Jeff Golden, COO, RaivenJeff Golden, COO
Raiven is a leading cloud-based purchasing platform that helps businesses more efficiently source and procure materials. Raiven’s purchasing program provides discounts from industry-leading suppliers, while their AI-powered platform efficiently searches multiple distributors for needed products based on availability, price, and company preferences. Raiven is used by hundreds of contractors, facility managers, and building owners to save time and money. In fact, Qmerit, the leading installer of EV charging stations and other electrification equipment across the U.S., leverages Raiven’s distributor and OEM offerings to provide their electrical contractors with substantial discounts on parts, equipment, and business essentials.

In an interview with CIO Application, Jeff Golden, COO of Raiven, sheds light on how Raiven’s platform and purchasing program helps clients make the best and most effective purchasing and sourcing decisions.

What are some of the challenges faced by your clients?

The most common challenge our customers face is purchasing compliance–trying to get employees to purchase from their preferred suppliers with whom they’ve negotiated discounts and service levels. When they don’t, rogue spending occurs, which creates an ongoing challenge for procurement departments. One common reason is that the responsibility for profit and loss (P&L) remains local while the supplier agreements are executed at the corporate level. Frequently, the local branch may find materials cheaper but lacks the ability to factor in benefits such as delivery and payment terms that the corporate team has secured with the supplier.

Another issue we see is a desire to reduce costs amidst the inflationary pressures that have resulted from widespread supply chain interruptions. A by product of this disruption creates yet another challenge; finding suppliers that have materials available. Electrical contractors, for instance, are being told that some common wire and circuit breakers will not be available until late Q1 of 2022. As a result, contractors are spending an enormous amount of time trying to find available equipment and materials.

How does Raiven solve these problems?

Our exclusive collaboration with Avendra—a leader in purchasing programs and supply chain management—gives prenegotiated discounts on maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) products and exceptional service levels. Avendra handles the contract negotiations and supplier management, while Raiven provides the technology to streamline the searching and buying process while dramatically improving purchasing compliance.

Our cloud-based Marketplace accounts for customers’ preferences of availability, price, and supplier services to seamlessly surface multiple supplier options for a given search. In addition to rapid browsing and purchasing, customers can save shopping lists for repeat purchases, submit electronic quote requests to suppliers, establish approval workflows, and access detailed purchasing analytics. Raiven also makes it simple to add your preferred suppliers to our Marketplace so your employees can go to one location for all their purchasing.

Furthermore, Raiven’s digital buying assistant is a revolutionary new technology that makes compliance easy. When employees search on an unapproved supplier’s website, it alerts employees when it finds an exact match or similar item from one of their preferred suppliers. Now customers finally have an automated way to control rogue spending without any change management needed. Instead, we can meet the customer where they shop and surface the options employers would like to make visible.

Our digital buying assistant dramatically improves purchasing compliance while saving buyers time and money

At the heart of our platform is the Quality Contribution Index (QCITM), which tracks the performance of your supplier network. The QCI is a score that is constantly calculated based on performance, pricing reliability, responsiveness, procedural compliance, and other factors. These scores are visible to all key stakeholders, resulting in a strong motivation structure that incentivizes desired behaviour and provides real-time performance feedback. The quant group at Mercer (MMC), the world’s largest human capital consulting business, tested and verified the QCI algorithm.

What would you describe as a successful client engagement story?

We had a client that purchased most of their supplies from a single supplier with whom they had no negotiated discounts but who they preferred because of their service levels and long-standing relationship. We were able to help them in three ways. First, our contracted discounts with this preferred supplier instantly generated savings on the items they commonly purchased. Second, our AI algorithm identified products that were being purchased that were available at a lower price from another supplier in our purchasing program. Finally, our digital buying assistant determined that some users were frequently buying specialty products from a particular supplier because no one else carried these products. The decision was made to add the supplier to the Raiven Marketplace, saving the customer time and money for that category of materials.

What does the future hold for Raiven?

Raiven’s overarching objective is to save buyers time and money by positively influencing every purchasing decision through our AI-based technologies. Our patentpending AI algorithm powers our Marketplace and our digital buying assistant, which is constantly expanding its speed and ability to surface matching options on any website that carries products related to the customer search.

One example is our recent customization of the digital buying assistant to create a digital project quoting process. Using the same AI engine that powers our digital buying assistant’s ability to surface matching offerings from preferred suppliers when a product is searched on any website, we created a simpler way for project managers to compile and quote pricing for materials needed for prospective jobs. Most of our clients work on projects that require a bill of materials to be sourced and priced so that the contractor can return a quote to their clients for any variety of construction, retrofit, or service-oriented work. To assist these contractors, our technology allows users to simply click an “add-to-quote-list” button as they navigate various OEM and supplier websites. Instead of manually capturing the information they find online and building an excel spreadsheet or email for these projects, one simple click automatically adds the items to a quote list that can then be instantly sent to any supplier of their choice for a quotation. The same technology can also instantly generate “best pricing” from the existing preferred supplier pricing agreements as a framework for the customer to begin their negotiations with their preferred suppliers.

In the end, it is our goal to help buyers make the best and quickest purchasing decisions with a technology that accompanies their natural workflow processes.

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