AI in Procurement: Lessons Learned from FMCG Implementation
Three years ago, our procurement team at a mid-sized FMCG company faced a crisis that would ultimately transform how we approach supplier management and trade spend decisions. We were hemorrhaging margin on promotional campaigns that failed to deliver expected lift, our trade spend allocation was based more on historical precedent than data-driven insights, and our category management teams were drowning in spreadsheets trying to make sense of supplier performance across hundreds of SKUs. The pressure from executive leadership was mounting: optimize procurement or face restructuring. That pressure became the catalyst for our journey into artificial intelligence. Looking back, I can identify specific turning points, mistakes we made, and breakthroughs that shaped our successful deployment of AI in Procurement . These lessons came at a cost, measured in failed pilot projects, resistance from skeptical stakeholders, and more than a few late nights debugging data quality issues. But they a...