WESTFALL TECHNIK & ARKESTRO
Schultz found that the team of people behind the platform were also eager to support his own business operations , as well as the vast ecosystem of suppliers he deals with on a daily basis .
“ We invest in people ,” explains Schultz . “ It ' s not just technology , it ' s people , and the pedigree of Edmund ’ s background and experience as well as his vision for the company – this was all very reassuring to us . In particular , we need the suppliers to want to participate , cooperate , and know they have taken part in a fair process . “ Data-driven solutions are the ultimate goal – we should all do our best to ignore any opinions masquerading as fact ,” says Schultz . “ There ’ s certainly a tremendous amount of information out there about AI and ML , which is very important , but I often remind myself that it ’ s the intersection of artificial intelligence with human intelligence that really makes it all work .”
Arkestro is at the forefront of costmodelling by ML and behavioural science , says Zagorin , following the groundwork on dynamic pricing laid by Expedia and Uber .
“ Predictive pricing is a concept that fundamentally simplifies a transaction ,” says Zagorin . “ It ’ s not necessarily better for one side or the other ; the advantage is it ' s so much faster to settle the terms of the transaction , enabling both parties to move on to building great supplier relationships .
Machine learning turns months into minutes The Arkestro platform is designed to cut through the disparate collection of workflows and workarounds that a typical company has to deal with today in order to source
56 % percentage of companies that experienced more disruptions to their supply chain in 2021 than in previous years , according to the Hubs Supply Chain Resilience Report 2021
pricing for everything from materials to spare parts . This might include suppliers working with manual spreadsheets , having to copy and paste prices and pitches , dealing with procurement teams on a case-by-case basis , and a wealth of additional measures , each created from scratch by individual companies and teams . “ And , in many cases when it comes to long-held supplier relationships , personal knowledge of the companies is important when making supplier decisions ,” says Zagorin . “ Traditionally , the entire process can take , conservatively speaking , weeks , but frequently , months and sometimes years depending on the complexity . When we looked at this , we knew that if we simulated the process at the start where requests are pre-filled with validated data-driven recommendations , Arkestro could make it so much easier and faster for suppliers to conduct business .” manufacturingdigital . com 35