The Challenge
Our client, a global leader in power and automation technologies, operates across 80+ countries. The company faced significant challenges in their vendor onboarding process. They managed 20,000-30,000 third parties annually across over 30 Enterprise Resource Planning systems. Our client needed to decrease lead times, improve risk coverage, and create a consistent, automated approach to supplier due diligence. Their existing manual processes were time-intensive, inconsistent, and unable to scale.
The Solution
Our client partnered with Xapien to implement an AI-powered, automated risk screening solution integrated directly into their SAP environment. Xapien’s technology enables our client to conduct comprehensive pre-screening of suppliers in minutes rather than days. The platform analyses both structured and unstructured data across seven key risk categories: Integrity/Compliance, ESG/Sustainability, Cybersecurity, Financial, Geopolitical, Quality Management, and Business Continuity.
The solution includes bespoke risk scoring frameworks configured to our client’s specific requirements and custom report templates aligned to different supplier categories and risk levels. Xapien’s seamless API integration drives automated workflow actions in SAP based on risk ratings. The platform’s advanced disambiguation technology ensures accurate 1:1 matching of suppliers, dramatically reducing false positives that traditionally plague screening processes.
The Outcome
Through this partnership, our client has transformed their supplier onboarding process. Lead times are projected to reduce by up to 80% for low-risk suppliers, enabling the procurement team to focus their expertise on reviewing medium and high-risk profiles. Automated pre-screening provides full risk coverage across all relevant domains, moving beyond traditional database checks to analyse the entire indexed internet for comprehensive due diligence. The client reported that Xapien has enhanced the supplier experience by providing consistent, structured risk profiles for every supplier and rules-based workflow automation in SAP. Xapien supported the client in improving their resource efficiency and scaling their global procurement operations, all while maintaining the audit trails and compliance-grade AI outputs required for regulatory scrutiny.
