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Dun & Bradstreet
While bad choices may make the best stories, selecting a risky supplier can be a nightmare for unsuspecting procurement specialists and the organizations they support. That is where Dun & Bradstreet steps in.
Dun & Bradstreet is recognized as a trusted source of accurate and objective business information. As a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics, Dun & Bradstreet plays a critical role in helping businesses evaluate and manage risk as the company’s data and insights are relied upon by governments, corporations and other entities worldwide. With a reputation built over nearly two centuries, Dun & Bradstreet’s expertise, insights and data are trusted to inform strategic business decisions, making it a cornerstone of the global business ecosystem.
The steadfast success of Dun & Bradstreet is its ability to continuously provide balanced, transparent, and trusted evaluations of business risks to meet the advancing needs of its clients. Dun & Bradstreet provides the data and ability for businesses to have transparency and illumination within their supplier chain. The risks associated with suppliers and their visibility are always top of mind. Chief Revenue Officer of Dun & Bradstreet, Isabel Gomez Vidal, describes the process. “We examined challenges such as: What is the reputation of supplier you are choosing? Do they have the ESG characteristics that you want? How can we automate processes to onboard suppliers in a faster way? We thought we had relevant data for that use case.”
To maintain its wide range of analytical scores and predictors, Dun & Bradstreet sought to lean into leading-edge technology to support its next iteration. IBM was the logical choice as the organization is a Dun & Bradstreet customer and a trusted supplier of advanced consulting, data and analytics capabilities, and cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Additionally, the vast supplier information stores and industry-leading AI assistant technology of IBM complemented the world-class global business records of Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud, making IBM an ideal partner for the project.
According to Vidal, there were additional reasons to collaborate with IBM. “We selected IBM for our initial use case as IBM has thousands and thousands of vendors and suppliers and massive amounts of related data and gen AI capabilities to automate analytics processes. Collectively, our data stores would be a major benefit to the product development and analytics processes needed as we address the business and procurement challenges faced by organizations during the selection of third-party vendors,” says Vidal.
Teamwork between the trusted partners began when IBM Consulting® engaged its multi-pronged engineering, technology, data and analytics and governance expertise. The team designed plans to transform supplier risk evaluation and vendor selection for organizations, particularly at the procurement phase. Dun & Bradstreet recognized its customer processes were mired in manual, time-consuming effort that lacked real-time visibility. The team set out to combine IBM AI expertise and technology with the strength of the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud, which holds over 590 million trusted and proprietary data records, to provide more comprehensive views of prospective businesses.
The initial pilot, completed through the collaboration of the Dun & Bradstreet and IBM teams, integrated the advanced AI capabilities of IBM® watsonx Orchestrate™, Llama 3 and Mistral large language models on IBM Cloud®. IBM Consulting introduced AI assistant capabilities from watsonx Orchestrate to develop D&B Ask Procurement. The assistant provides a conversational chat experience that automates repetitive tasks and simplifies complex procurement processes. Additionally, the integration of IBM Garage™ methodologies enabled rapid prototyping and iterative improvements, which were essential to quickly and effectively achieve desired outcomes. The IBM Expert Labs played a pivotal role in the collaboration by fine-tuning and tailoring AI functionalities for specific procurement tasks.
The AI-powered pilot solution was the foundation for supplying customers with more comprehensive, instantaneous insights into supplier risk evaluation, fraud potential and revenue-based scores. “Our team was impressed by the depth of experience the IBM team brought to the table and the capabilities available through watsonx Orchestrate. Our procurement customers will be able to make comprehensive decisions faster and more efficiently, helping to improve their strategic planning risk management and mitigation,” says Gary Kotovets, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Dun & Bradstreet.
D&B Ask Procurement, embedded with the integration capabilities of watsonx Orchestrate, provides the ability to query deep data on suppliers and use advanced AI technology to interpret that data. It eliminates the need for time-consuming, manual data entry, thus reducing errors. Furthermore, the watsonx Orchestrate provides the ability to integrate advanced automation capabilities to streamline work across systems and enhances the overall efficiency and effectiveness.
With D&B Ask Procurement providing trusted and proprietary data and AI-informed solutions, users can gain comprehensive, nearly instantaneous, 360o insights to support supplier risk evaluation. The greater levels of intelligence, derived from the customer’s own systems and data, backed by robust Dun & Bradstreet datasets, can enable businesses to make more strategic decisions and mitigate risks with estimates of 10-20% reduction in time for procurement tasks, leading to significant cost savings. Advanced analytics and customization capabilities allow customers to evaluate their vendor pool based on essential supplier risk information, such as financials, linkage, ownership, ESG and more. Vidal adds, “As you begin your AI journey, be thoughtful, be ethical and be responsible. Be sure you have a clear line of sight toward the outcome and what you would like to achieve. And make sure you’re partnering with vendors and companies that have the same values, so you can be successful in your journey.”
Furthermore, AI-powered D&B Ask Procurement also empowers users with real-time monitoring to anticipate potential supplier issues, to take preemptive measures and secure continuity and stability throughout their value chains. The outcome is a frictionless experience, delivering relevant data and insights in context, and allowing customers to onboard suppliers faster and more efficiently.
Now that’s a promising story.
Dun & Bradstreet (link resides outside of ibm.com), a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics, enables companies around the world to improve their business performance. Dun & Bradstreet’s Data Cloud fuels solutions and delivers insights that empower customers to accelerate revenue, lower cost, mitigate risk and transform their businesses. Since 1841, companies of every size have relied on Dun & Bradstreet to help them manage risk and reveal opportunity. For more information on Dun & Bradstreet, please visit www.dnb.com.
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