PIERRE LAPRÉE
AI IN PROCUREMENT
PIERRE LAPRÉE
TITLE: CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER COMPANY: SPENDHQ
INDUSTRY: SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
LOCATION: ATLANTA, US
Pierre serves as Chief Product Officer at SpendHQ, where he blends deep procurement expertise with entrepreneurial vision to shape industry-leading solutions.
Spencer confronts a parallel issue in direct materials. Reflecting on his Tesla days, he recalls:“ We were sourcing US $ 30bn of car parts on spreadsheets and emails, and when I went to the market, there really wasn’ t a solution to address it.”
The gap persists.“ On the left side of the equation upstream, we have the PLM system,” he explains.“ On the other side, the ERP. And in between you’ ve had this whole chasm where there’ s a lot of work that actually has to happen – all in these manual spreadsheets, processes, meetings with no coherent digital ecosystem.”
LightSource’ s response is Spec-to- Scale:“ spec to source”( aligning on design through sourcing),“ source to supply”( award through industrialisation) and“ supply to scale”( initial production through ongoing lifecycle management). This creates a data backbone spanning engineering, procurement, manufacturing and finance – the foundation AI needs to function.
Pierre brings a spend intelligence perspective. SpendHQ has spent at least a decade“ bringing clients a very solid data foundation that they can base their action upon.” The shift now is volume:“ We’ ve been using data science and machine learning to generate insights for our clients for so long, but now we’ re just generating too much because there are so many signals out there.”
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