Fortience Consulting Launches Service to Enhance Procurement Quote Assessment and Price Negotiation Using Generative AI

Fortience Consulting Inc. (formerly Qunie Corp.; Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President: Shigeki Yamaguchi; hereafter 'Fortience') will launch a service to support the enhancement of quote assessment and price negotiation using generative AI, starting June 4.

This service visualizes complex quote assessment decisions, such as price validity and room for negotiation, by integrating Fortience's cross-industry procurement expertise and the assessment perspectives and logic of veteran enterprise staff into generative AI prompts. By generating price negotiation proposals based on assessment results, it aims to standardize assessment and negotiation quality and eliminate reliance on individual tacit knowledge.

During implementation, Fortience consultants with deep expertise in procurement, AI, and governance will conduct interviews to understand the company's current 'quote assessment and price negotiation' operations and define requirements. The company will then conduct a Proof of Concept (PoC) based on generative AI prompts that incorporate necessary perspectives for these tasks to verify applicability and effectiveness. Furthermore, the company systematically supports the preparation for deployment, including the establishment of operational rules, until the system is successfully integrated and consistently used in the field. This enables early realization of advanced quote assessment and price negotiation using optimal generative AI applications tailored to individual company challenges and maturity levels.

## Background
Amidst new procurement challenges such as labor shortages and the need for BCP (Business Continuity Planning) and sustainability procurement due to supply chain instability, procurement departments are required to make more efficient and sophisticated decisions than ever before.

Tasks such as quote assessment and price negotiation still depend on the tacit knowledge of veteran staff because quote formats vary by supplier, and historical performance and market data are often scattered as unstructured data. Specifically, judgments regarding 'whether a proposed price is reasonable' or 'where there is room for negotiation' often rely on the knowledge of veterans, leading to issues of individual dependency and inconsistency in decision-making quality. To solve these issues, Fortience has launched this service to enhance 'quote assessment and price negotiation' by leveraging its expertise in procurement and generative AI.

## Overview
In this service, Fortience consultants, who are well-versed in procurement and generative AI, provide consistent support for the use of generative AI in corporate 'quote assessment and price negotiation,' covering everything from requirements definition and PoC to deployment and stabilization, working alongside the client until the system is self-sustaining in the field. Particularly in prompt design and PoC-based validation, the use of generative AI prompts that have pre-incorporated essential perspectives for these tasks allows for rapid verification.

## Features
### Rapid Enhancement of Quote Comparison and Assessment
AI-OCR is used to digitize quote forms that vary by supplier, automatically identifying items and formatting them into a unified structure. Additionally, it suggests completion candidates for missing mandatory items, reducing rework in data preparation.

Furthermore, it automatically generates comparison tables and assessment materials for multiple suppliers, automating the search, extraction, and transcription of relevant information, thereby significantly reducing the man-hours required for document preparation.

### Reproducing Veteran Judgment and Eliminating Individual Dependency
In quote assessment, Fortience integrates its own knowledge accumulated through procurement reforms across various industries with the practical knowledge of the client's veteran staff, structuring this into assessment logic. Quote assessment requires judgments beyond simple comparisons, involving complex logic such as 'fair price estimation considering rising labor costs' and 'cost driver analysis.' By incorporating these veteran assessment logics into generative AI, the AI verbalizes 'why a price is reasonable' and 'where there is room for negotiation.' This enables less-experienced staff to reproduce expert-level judgments backed by cross-industry knowledge, preventing individual dependency and creating assessment proposals with the necessary grounds for internal and external explanations.