Maintaining a strong supplier’s relationship has always been a key point in an organization’s SCM strategies. This can take different form and functions depending on the size of the organizations. For example, small companies who do not have large number of suppliers will invest indirectly on the suppliers, while large companies who have many suppliers will have to form a specific team catering to supplier management. Enterprises have been spending millions of dollars directly or indirectly to have a sound supplier management system – without a proper strategy in place, they stand a huge exposure in terms of operational risks.

According to a recent survey, the accounts payable team spends 30% of their time in answering the queries by supplier. On the other hand, Paystream’s research shows one of the top factors contributing to poor supplier relationship is Poor Dispute/Query Time Management.

Suppliers expect intuitive and seamless experience from their buyers. When an organization fails to engage their suppliers properly, they run a risk of inefficient supply operations and high processing cost.

The best way ahead is to automate the process to optimize resource utilization and improve relationships between the suppliers and their buyers. The need of the hour is also to have an artificial intelligence and cognitive computing engine that can manage customer queries round the clock without any delay. Enterprises are starting to invest heavily in the chat economy and it has fuelled the development of chatbots across various business functions. Most importantly with chatbots enterprises will have a cost-effective way to interact both inside and outside the organization

Chat-bot is one such solution designed by Avaali, powered by artificial intelligence language processing that have opened new realms of the customer engagement and innovative ways of doing business in the form of conversational commerce. Chat-bot is a rule based communications environment to support suppliers with answers to their queries, on a web-chat based environment, designed to bridge the communication gap between the suppliers and the buyers.

Typically, a supplier would want to interact with the buyer about their business transactions; to understand the status of their invoices submitted or understand the status of the payments associated with the invoices. With the chatbot, suppliers can stay up-to-date with information relevant to their business transactions and the payments associated with the transactions. Suppliers can now be engaged through a chat window, have their questions answered in a whisker without having to wait on the phone while the support agent checks for the updates on the centralized environment. Rest assured, system is designed to provide regulated access of the information to authenticated users. Suppliers can also upload invoices and their supporting documents to initiate Invoice Processing.