PRESS RELEASE – 24 October 2024 – Fullstep is a company specialising in end-to-end digitalisation, consultancy and outsourcing of procurement and supplier relationships, ensuring ESG compliance. With more than 20 years of experience, its portfolio includes companies of all sizes and sectors, including nearly 40% of IBEX35 companies. Recently it has launched 3 new solutions equipped with Artificial Intelligence for the global and intelligent management of supplier relations and risk, totally pioneering in the market. These developments have been carried out thanks to the grants for Research and Development Projects in AI and Other Digital Technologies and their Integration in Value Chains, managed by RED.ES, and to the joint work with the University of Granada, valued as one of the 3 most important universities in Europe in Artificial Intelligence.

These pioneering products have been developed in collaboration with the University of Granada, valued as one of the 3 most important universities in Europe in Artificial Intelligence.These pioneering products in the market respond to the need of companies to have technological systems that help them to have a dynamic and automatic analysis and control of the relationship with suppliers, based on the monitoring of news, validation and document management necessary for the relationship with these suppliers, as well as the correct identification of financial and operational risks and ESG parameters.

This is key as it is the first step in the development of a new system to monitor and control the relationship with suppliers, based on the monitoring of news, validation and document management necessary for the relationship with these suppliers, as well as the correct identification of financial and operational risks and ESG parameters.This is key as large companies currently have between 2,000 and 10,000 suppliers, which have to comply with their supply chain risk policies. The number of certificates required from each supplier and the manual tasks involved in validating and extracting data from each certificate means that each company has to invest thousands of hours annually to maintain control over its supplier base.

“Nationally, the number of certificates required from each supplier and the manual tasks involved in validating and extracting data from each certificate means that each company has to invest thousands of hours annually to maintain control over its supplier base.”Our Fullstep web platform is modular, with a very high capacity for parameterisation, customisation and scalability. This allows us to incorporate products to serve the specific needs of each client. Artificial Intelligence and the incorporation of Deep Learning systems to obtain intelligent risk-supplier evaluation models in real time, applicable to any supplier in any sector of activity, will allow the transformation of the relationship with suppliers and improve the performance, the strategic purchasing activity“, says Jose F. Valderrama, Partner in charge of Technology at Fullstep.Pioneering solutions for risk profiling and intelligent supplier approval, media news monitoring and document management

Pioneering solutions for risk profiling and intelligent supplier approval, media news monitoring and document management

More and more companies are relying on technological systems to establish a complete, dynamic and real-time analysis and control of objectives. However, there is still a long way to go to digitise the supply chain and, more specifically, to equip systems with AI to efficiently reduce the risk to which companies are exposed, associated with their supply chain.

In this regard, Fullstep has launched 3 new high-end technological products for the analysis and management of supplier risk:

1. Intelligent validation of documentation. This new product optimises the document management process with suppliers. The large volume of documentation required from the supplier base means that companies have to allocate a large number of resources, and even so, the documents expire, remain unvalidated, due to the difficulty of correctly tracking the documentation due to lack of time or human error, etc. This means that the information available from the supplier base is not always reliable. This product makes it possible to carry out the validation process of these certificates in a standardised and automated way through AI. In this way, efficiency and cost savings are gained in the process, in addition to complying with risk management requirements and guaranteeing regulatory compliance thanks to the automatic generation of alerts for file tracking. The platform currently works with current Social Security and tax documents, official ISOs, etc., and is capable of handling PDF formats with extractable text as well as scanned images, multi-screen documents and multi-certificate in any language.

2. Media tracking. This product allows you to assess the risk of critical suppliers to make informed and immediate decisions, following the detection and analysis of information collected in real time from different online sources. The intelligent algorithm collects thousands of news items from all over the world every day and selects only the key risk suppliers. After that, the platform presents a centralised and orderly analysis of market sentiment. In addition, the user can give feedback on the impact of that news or information that the platform has reported. “Supplier management increasingly involves complying with the regulations established by governmental bodies and institutions in ESG matters. That is why the monitoring of all the news, collected through multiple sources, will favour those companies committed to sustainability and the environment, which gives added value to these entities“, assures Jose F. Valderrama, Partner in charge of Technology at Fullstep.

3.Supplier risk monitoring. This product, through AI, makes it possible to create a global risk map of the supplier ecosystem, updated automatically and continuously. This product automates the analytical process, integrating information from the platform, public sources and third parties, calculating the global risk of suppliers in real time. This product controls 3 types of risk: operational, financial or ESG. It displays the results of this analysis, offering immediate knowledge of the status of each supplier, its rating and evolution, as well as a 360º view of the key risk parameters at a global level. In this way, the company has an overview of both active and inactive suppliers, in order to control awards, contracted orders, etc.