SUNNYVALE, Calif. — August 10, 2018 — LevaData, the company whose Cognitive Sourcing platform delivers sustainable cost management, increased agility and efficiency for strategic sourcing and procurement professionals, today announced that its Leva Early Adopter Program (LEAP) has shown positive, measurable results with global customers such as Fitbit, Plantronics, and Bose.
In an effort to demonstrate the power of Leva™, the AI Advisor solution built on LevaData's Cognitive Sourcing Platform, the company recruited some of its key customers for the program. The goal was to demonstrate how Leva's AI and predictive tools could transform sourcing into a competitive, first-mover advantage. The first milestone, measuring value, was reached on May 15.
"Joining LEAP was a big win for us," said Kevin Purser, head of global supply chain operations, sourcing and procurement at Fitbit. "We were able to use Leva to guide through sourcing risks and savings opportunities that we would not have identified as quickly otherwise, if at all. The team loved how it personalized recommendations for each person's role, including procurement, finance and manufacturing. And Leva's predictive skills help us to optimize our decision-making in the face of complex sourcing issues and large data sets."
LEAP was designed to be an easy-to-deploy, low-risk, high-reward way to discover Leva's ROI through firsthand experience of applied AI for cognitive sourcing. For a six-week period, participating customers received access to a select set of Leva's skills, along with the opportunity to provide feedback and help LevaData prioritize those benefits of most value to each customer.
Each LEAP participant tested six areas of validation/adoption:
Predictive Costing
Leva predicted the impact of market dynamics and internal spend drivers across suppliers, parts, products, commodities, and regions. With this proactive information, participants were able to anticipate emerging shifts and enable proactive decisions as a hedge against their competitors.
Negotiation Playbooks
Leva recommended the best negotiation levers to use with each supplier or scope of spend. It learned from each negotiation over time to improve outcomes and predict probability of target cost achievement in the future.
Expanded Negotiation Levers
In addition to one-click generation of negotiation playbooks, Leva also expanded the set of levers participants could use during a negotiation. It automatically selected the highest-impact levers specific to spend scope - such as sub-commodity, manufacturer, supplier, and related parts - to maximize outcomes.
Opportunity Sensing
This was a live demonstration of Leva as an intelligent advisor. It constantly explored all relevant information sources and intelligently identified emerging risks and opportunities as changes occurred.
Information Curation
Related to Leva's core learning abilities, participants saw an increase in recommendation relevance. They experienced how Leva directed its insights to the team member or division most able to act on its learnings.
Automated Classification
Leva provided participants with advanced classification of a broad set of commodities and sub-commodities. This helped to optimize their decision-making process and demonstrated how Leva learns the intricacies of each organization's unique environment.
"We're grateful to the customers who took part in LEAP," commented Rajesh Kalidindi, founder and CEO of LevaData. "Giving them access to Leva in exchange for feedback was a win-win for everyone involved. We received excellent insights, and they saw real, measurable improvements to their procurement and sourcing functions."
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About LevaData
LevaData, the Cognitive Sourcing™ Platform, offers global enterprises the ability to improve gross margins by reducing supply chain costs, with a focus on transforming the way global enterprises source products and services. Customers include leaders in the top global supply chain organizations, as well as medium-sized OEMs seeking to achieve best-in-class direct materials sourcing practices. LevaData is privately held and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit www.levadata.com.
Contact for LevaData:
Gabrielle Jasinski, 708-732-3913
gabrielle@bospar.com
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