Major Manufacturer Cuts Procurement Costs by 30%

The customer is a leading automotive parts and precision machining group in East China, with annual procurement spend in the billions of RMB across metals, outsourced processing, MRO, and logistics. Purchasing was previously fragmented across more than ten subsidiaries and plants, with inconsistent contract terms, pricing, and delivery standards—long sourcing cycles and weak negotiation leverage.

Business challenges

• Similar materials carried multiple price systems across plants, with no group-level visibility or benchmarking.
• RFP and RFQ packages were assembled manually, with version chaos, long review cycles, and frequent omissions of key terms.
• Supplier onboarding and performance lived in spreadsheets and email, making risk and delivery issues hard to catch early.

Solution

The group adopted Tender AI as its unified procurement collaboration platform: historical orders, drawings, and technical requirements were structured into a knowledge base; intelligent sourcing auto-generated RFQ packages and scoring criteria; a supplier portal centralized quotes and clarifications; contracts and pricing entered a single ledger linked to supplier performance data.

Implementation highlights

Phase one focused on sheet metal and outsourced machining—high-spend categories—with standard BOMs and specification templates. Phase two extended to MRO and logistics. Key users included group procurement, plant buyers, and quality teams, with role-based permissions and approval flows balancing compliance and speed.

Measurable outcomes

• Total procurement cost fell approximately 30% versus baseline, driven mainly by competitive bidding and specification normalization.
• Average cycle from launch to award shortened by approximately 40%.
• On-time delivery improved by roughly 12 percentage points within six months.

Note: Figures reflect a composite of typical customer scenarios; actual results vary by scale and category mix.