Fullstep, a company specializing in end-to-end digitalization, consulting, and outsourcing in procurement and supplier management, ensures compliance with ESG (environmental, social, and governance) regulations. With over 20 years of experience, Fullstep has a wide portfolio of clients from various sectors and sizes, including nearly 40% of the companies in the IBEX35. Recently, it has launched three innovative solutions equipped with Artificial Intelligence for advanced and comprehensive management of supplier relationships and associated risks, positioning itself as a pioneer in the industry.
These developments have been made possible thanks to the funding managed by RED.ES for R&D projects in Artificial Intelligence and digital technologies in the value chain, as well as collaboration with the University of Granada, considered one of the top three European universities in the field of AI.
Fullstep’s new solutions address the need for companies to have technological systems that facilitate automatic and dynamic analysis and control in supplier relationships. These tools integrate news monitoring, document validation and management, and the identification of financial, operational, and ESG risks for each supplier.
For large companies, which typically manage between 2,000 and 10,000 suppliers, compliance with risk policies in the supply chain is essential. The number of certificates required from each supplier and the manual tasks of validation and data extraction account for thousands of hours of annual work to maintain control and ensure compliance within their supplier base.
“Our Fullstep web platform is modular, highly configurable, customizable, and scalable. This allows us to incorporate products to meet the specific needs of each client. Artificial Intelligence and the integration of Deep Learning systems to create intelligent risk-supplier assessment models in real-time, applicable to any supplier in any sector, will transform the relationship with suppliers and improve performance and strategic procurement activities,” says Jose F. Valderrama, partner responsible for the technology area at Fullstep.
More and more companies are opting for technological systems to establish comprehensive, dynamic, and real-time objective analysis and control. However, there is still a long journey ahead for the digitalization of supply chains and, more specifically, to equip systems with AI to efficiently reduce the risks that companies face associated with their supply chains.
In this regard, Fullstep has launched three high-tech products for the analysis and management of supplier risk.
Intelligent Document Validation
This new product allows the optimization of the documentation management process with suppliers. The large volume of documentation required from the supplier base forces companies to allocate significant resources, and even then, documents may expire or remain unvalidated due to difficulties in tracking documentation caused by time constraints or human errors. This means that the available information from the supplier base is not always reliable. This product enables the standardized validation process for these certificates to be automated through AI. As a result, efficiency is gained, and cost savings are achieved in the process, while also meeting risk management requirements and ensuring compliance through the automatic generation of alerts for document follow-up. Currently, the platform works with documents related to Social Security or Tax payments, official ISOs, etc., and can process formats in PDFs with extractable text as well as scanned images, multi-page documents, and multi-certificate documents in any language.
Media Tracking
This product allows the evaluation of risks associated with critical suppliers to make informed and immediate decisions, following the detection and analysis of information collected in real-time from various online sources. The intelligent algorithm gathers thousands of news articles from around the world each day and selectively identifies the key issues regarding risky suppliers. After this, the platform centrally and orderly presents a market sentiment analysis. Additionally, the user can provide feedback on the impact of the news or information reported by the platform. “Supplier management increasingly involves compliance with regulations set by government agencies and institutions concerning ESG matters. For this reason, monitoring all news collected from multiple sources will benefit those companies committed to sustainability and the environment, adding value to those entities,” assures Jose F. Valderrama, partner responsible for the technology area at Fullstep.
Supplier Risk Monitoring
This product, through AI, allows the creation of a global risk map of the supplier ecosystem, automatically and continuously updated. With this product, the analytical process is automated, integrating information from the platform, public sources, and third parties, calculating the global risk of suppliers in real-time. This product monitors three types of risk: operational, financial, and ESG. It presents the results of this analysis, providing immediate knowledge of the status of each supplier, their rating and evolution, as well as a 360º view of key risk parameters at a global level. This way, the company has an overall view of both active and inactive suppliers to control awards, contracted orders, etc.