Knowledge · Guide 8 of 8
From case to pattern
Every answered question first resolves a single case. Look at hundreds of such answers over months, though, and patterns appear that stay invisible in day-to-day work. That is where the next step begins, from information to insight.
What hindsight reveals
A single blocked invoice is an incident. When the same kind of price variance recurs with one supplier every month, it is a pattern. Perhaps a price increase was never reflected in the contract, or the supplier is invoicing incorrectly as a matter of routine.
Deliveries work the same way. Whether a supplier is occasionally late or whether lead times have been creeping up for months makes a big difference to procurement strategy. In any single case, the two are almost impossible to tell apart.
Specialists call this looking back ex-post analysis. It asks not what is happening right now, but what keeps recurring over time and why.
Why the domain model is decisive
Patterns can only be recognized when individual cases are comparable. If a discrepancy is recorded once as a quantity issue and once as a price issue, even though the cause is the same, the pattern stays hidden.
The shared domain model from Guide 6 ensures that the same things are called the same. Only then do hundreds of individual answers become a foundation on which connections can be seen.
From domain model to knowledge graph
The next step connects the concrete cases to each other. Which supplier, which contract, which purchase orders, which discrepancies, which resolutions? Together, those connections form a knowledge graph of your own procurement.
A graph like this makes questions possible that hardly anyone asks today, because the answer would take too long. Which suppliers cause the most resolution cases? Which contracts regularly lead to discrepancies? Where do we lose discounts, and why always in the same places?
Where this is heading
Xient Bridge starts by answering questions reliably. Building on that, capabilities emerge that do more than inform. They reveal connections and flag the need for action early.
Procurement is the first process. Invoice verification, warehousing, sales and controlling follow on the same principle. The goal is a company that can not only query its own data but understand it.
We are taking this path step by step, and only as far as the value can be demonstrated on real questions. If you would like to explore where it could begin in your procurement, we would be glad to talk.
Frequently asked questions
What is ex-post analysis in procurement?
Looking at many completed transactions over time to identify recurring patterns and their causes.
What is a knowledge graph?
A network of concrete cases such as suppliers, contracts, purchase orders and discrepancies that reveals connections across many individual cases.
Does Bridge offer this today?
Today, Bridge answers questions reliably from SAP. Pattern recognition builds on that and is developing step by step, process by process.
Want to see what this looks like in your procurement? Request a demo