INSPYR Velocity Modernizes Commodity Intelligence to Protect Millions in Procurement Value
Challenge
The client’s procurement analysts rely on commodity intelligence every day to determine whether supplier cost increases are supported by actual commodity movements and to build evidence for vendor negotiations. Although the original platform was effective, the capability depended on a third party vendor and operates as a black box. The client was not able to inspect or modify the underlying calculation logic, and approximately 800 product group recipes were maintained separately in a Google spreadsheet without formal version history, an audit trail, or administrative redundancy.
The 2025 tariff environment exposed another limitation. Vendors increasingly blended commodity and tariff justifications into cost increase requests, but tariff analysis was not supported by the platform. The client’s analysts had to maintain a separate manual spreadsheet alongside the system, creating additional operational complexity and limiting auditability. This combination of vendor dependency, concentrated institutional knowledge, and manual workarounds created a structural risk around a capability that directly supports material procurement savings.
Solution
The client knew that they could turn to INSPYR Solutions after working with our team on various projects in the past, so they engaged our team to develop a client-owned commodity intelligence platform designed to preserve the analytical capabilities of the existing solution while improving transparence and resilience.
Through INSPYR Velocity, our AI-augmented delivery model, we accelerated the software development lifecycle while maintaining engineering oversight, validation, governance, and traceability. Experienced engineers orchestrated specialized AI agents across requirements, architecture, development, testing, security, deployment, and documentation. The INSPYR Velocity model allows our team to utilize AI to accelerate repeatable software development lifecycle activities while experts review, validate, and govern the resulting artifacts and software. The resulting solution our team created includes:
- Parallel Validation: The new solution ran alongside the existing platform during a 90-day pilot, allowing the client to compare calculation outputs and confirm parity before making a migration decision.
- Commodity Cost Analysis: Procurement analysts can upload vendor cost requests, automatically map SKUs to product groups and commodity recipes, calculate commodity movement, and compare proposed increases against historical cost and index data.
- Transparent Calculation Engine: The client owns the underlying calculation logic, allowing formulas, assumptions, mappings, and data sources to be inspected, validated, and modified as business requirements evolve.
- Centralized Recipe Management: Approximately 800 commodity recipes and SKU mappings are migrated from manual spreadsheets into a governed data store with version history, role-based administration, automated validation, and auditability.
- Proactive Procurement Intelligence: Dashboards allow users to monitor commodity movements, financial exposure, opportunities, and risks across buyers, departments, categories, vendors, and SKUs.
- Improved Analyst Workflows: Users can modify SKU mappings and commodity inputs, save opportunities with date stamps, configure chart date ranges, identify unmapped SKUs, and receive automated index-expiration alerts.
- Enterprise Data Integration: The platform now integrates with Snowflake, Oracle, Okta, Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Mintec, Tableau, and the client’s authentication services while remaining read-only with respect to downstream cost systems.
Outcome
The new commodity intelligence platform preserves the client’s existing negotiation capability while reducing the operational and strategic risks associated with the previous vendor-controlled solution.
The immediate benefits include:
- Preserved Procurement Value: The platform is designed to maintain the analytical capability that has supported millions of dollars in negotiated outcomes while avoiding disruption during the transition.
- Greater Platform Ownership: The client gains control of the application, calculation logic, and data model instead of depending on a third-party black-box solution.
- Improved Data Resilience: Recipe knowledge moves from a spreadsheet managed by one individual into a governed platform with versioning, audit history, and multi-user administration.
- Faster Analyst Workflows: In-platform mapping, monitoring, reporting, and configuration capabilities reduce manual steps and improve routine cost analyses.
- Enhanced Auditability: Calculation logic, recipe changes, mappings, and saved opportunities can be traced through structured records and immutable audit logs.
- Foundation for Tariff Intelligence: The architecture establishes a path for integrating Harmonized Tariff Schedule codes, country-of-origin information, and tariff-rate data in future phases, addressing a key limitation identified during the 2025 tariff cycle.
Client Profile
The client is a major retailer operating online and across its many physical locations throughout the United States. The company serves a diverse customer base by fulfilling a wide variety of needs wherever its customers are. This Fortune 500 business is known for providing consumers with exceptional value through quality products, excellent service, and low prices.
Technologies Supported
INSPYR Velocity, FastAPI, Kubernetes, Microsoft Azure, Mintec, Okta, Oracle, Python, React, Snowflake, Tableau
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