Process & Story
Orkla Home & Personal Care is a leading supplier of branded consumer goods and concept solutions to the grocery, specialized retail, pharmacy, and bakery sectors. OHPC focuses on products for personal hygiene, cleaning, and household care. They offer a wide range of products, including detergents, cleaning agents, personal care items, and hygiene products. OHPC operates primarily in the Nordic region but also has a presence in other European markets. The company is known for its strong portfolio of well-established brands that are trusted by consumers for their quality and effectiveness.
With their network of production plants, and each production plant ordering hundreds of materials, OHPC needed an efficient way to manage its procurement processes, especially when dealing with multiple suppliers.
Problem
OHPC needed a dedicated platform to streamline its procurement processes for two production plants. The challenge was to manage RFQs efficiently, automate supplier interactions, and provide seamless bid comparison and awarding processes. OHPC, despite utilizing SAP for broader business operations, heavily relied on custom spreadsheets and manual processes to manage procurement. The procurement team was tasked with juggling numerous RFQs and tracking communications with vendors through emails. Proposals submitted by suppliers had to be manually re-entered into spreadsheets for comparison, making it time-consuming and error-prone. Additionally, historical procurement data, such as past prices, had to be extracted from various sources and input manually to support decision-making.
This fragmented workflow created inefficiencies, slowed down the procurement cycle, and left the process vulnerable to human errors, making it difficult to manage multiple suppliers and ensure optimal pricing and supplier selection.
Solution
We developed a tailored, AI-powered application for OHPC, combining advanced data engineering, automation, and a user-focused interface to transform procurement processes from end to end.
Managing RFQs
The application enables users to efficiently create, publish, and track RFQs. Leveraging master data preparation and integration, it automates the RFQ creation process, dynamically matching materials to suitable suppliers based on material codes and historical interactions.
Dedicated vendor space
Suppliers access a secure, dedicated space within the application to submit proposals, upload documents, and respond to RFQs. Recognizing the challenge posed by varied, non-standardized response formats, we utilized multimodal AI to parse and structure unstructured data (e.g., PDFs, Excel files) in real time. This solution extracts relevant information — pricing, material specifications, vendor IDs — and standardizes it for seamless comparison, reducing data entry time and eliminating manual handling errors.
Automated proposal evaluation
The system incorporates sophisticated AI-driven data extraction techniques to conduct an initial evaluation of supplier proposals (to extract data points such as pricing, material specifications, and supplier history) and structuring them for easy comparison. This allows procurement teams to quickly assess bids and focus on high-priority decisions.
Supplier recommendations
The system provides real-time recommendations for optimal offers, supporting procurement teams in selecting the best suppliers based on detailed, side-by-side comparisons of pricing, material compatibility, and past performance. The platform’s advanced data pipeline is capable of processing hundreds of concurrent negotiations, drawing insights from historical data to highlight cost-effective choices, ensuring that procurement decisions are both informed and data-driven. As a result, OHPC is able to optimize its procurement operations, saving both time and costs, and ensuring that the best suppliers are consistently selected based on reliable, historical data.
