Savings opportunity identification
Summarize
Summary of Savings opportunity identification
The Savings Opportunity Discovery agentic workflow automates the identification of cost-saving opportunities by analyzing contracts, spend, and supplier data on a recurring schedule. It generates ranked savings opportunities for category managers, enabling them to prioritize review and action rather than manual data discovery. This workflow leverages AI-driven agents to produce consistent and actionable insights across all spend categories managed by the user, helping to uncover savings that might otherwise be missed or delayed.
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Key Features
- Automated Opportunity Discovery: The workflow scans procurement data weekly (or on-demand) and writes ranked opportunities to a dedicated table, complete with estimated savings, complexity assessments, and supporting insights.
- Three Specialized Agents:
- Contract Optimization Agent: Extracts contract clauses and forecasts spend impacts related to price escalations, renewal caps, and payment terms.
- Supplier Optimization Agent: Identifies fragmented spend across suppliers and non-preferred supplier usage to support supplier consolidation and risk reduction.
- Spend Optimization Agent: Detects off-contract spend and contract leakage from purchase orders to improve contract compliance.
- Savings Lever Framework: Opportunities are linked to specific savings levers such as renewal caps, price escalations, payment terms, off-contract spend, unconsolidated spend, and supplier consolidation, supporting extensibility without UI changes.
- Opportunity Lifecycle Management: Automatically updates, dismisses, or generates new opportunities based on the latest data, with closed opportunities linked to pipeline projects excluded from regeneration.
- Integration with Source-to-Pay Workspace: Category managers access opportunities via a unified Potential Savings Opportunities page or a Category Management tab, with an interactive Now Assist Panel for detailed review, simulations, and decision-making.
- Decision Support and Feedback: Managers can accept opportunities by creating pipeline projects or dismiss them with reasons, providing valuable feedback to improve future AI-driven opportunity generation.
- Role-Based Access Control: Read and write permissions to savings opportunities are governed by defined roles, ensuring secure and appropriate access for category managers and administrators.
- Required Plugins: The workflow depends on plugins for Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations, Sourcing Pipeline Management, and Spend and Savings Management.
Key Outcomes
- Consistent and Timely Savings Identification: Automated, scheduled scans eliminate manual, inconsistent reviews and help surface savings opportunities early enough for action.
- Improved Category Manager Efficiency: By focusing on reviewing AI-generated insights and decision-making, category managers save time and reduce oversight risk.
- Actionable Insights with Confidence: Opportunities include estimated savings values, complexity, and relevant supporting data, enabling informed decisions and targeted negotiations.
- Enhanced Spend and Supplier Management: Insights on supplier consolidation, contract compliance, and off-contract spend support strategic sourcing and procurement improvements.
- Seamless Workflow Integration: Accepted opportunities can be immediately converted into pipeline projects for tracking and execution within ServiceNow.
The Savings Opportunity Discovery agentic workflow automatically scans contracts, spend, and supplier data to surface ranked savings opportunities, helping category managers focus on review and action rather than manual discovery.
The Savings Opportunity Discovery agentic workflow scans contracts, spend, and supplier data on a recurring schedule and writes ranked savings opportunities to the Savings Opportunities
(sn_spend_gen_ai_savings_opportunities) table. An AI orchestrator triggers three optimization sub-agents in parallel, normalizes the results, and surfaces findings for category managers to review. Each
opportunity carries an estimated savings value, a complexity assessment, and supporting insights. Category managers see only the opportunities tied to spend categories they own.
Plugin dependencies
The following plugins are required to use the Savings Opportunity Discovery agentic workflow:
- Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations (SPO) (
sn_spend_gen_ai) - Sourcing Pipeline Management (
sn_spend_pipeline) - Spend and Savings Management (
sn_spend_mgmt)
Business value
Category managers have historically relied on manual reviews of contracts, spend, and supplier data to identify sourcing opportunities. The process is inconsistent across categories and time-consuming, so opportunities are missed or surfaced too late to act on. Scheduled, agent-based identification produces consistent output for every spend category and lets the team focus attention on review, simulation, and action rather than discovery.
Savings lever framework
Each opportunity is associated with a savings lever that describes the specific source of savings. Levers currently supported include renewal caps, price escalations, payment terms, off-contract spend, unconsolidated spend, supplier consolidation, and non-preferred supplier spend. The framework supports additional levers without changes to the user-facing review surface.
Savings Opportunity Discovery agentic workflow
Savings Opportunity Discovery agentic workflow contains three Opportunity Finder agents.
| Agent | Analyzes | Savings levers covered |
|---|---|---|
| Contract Optimization Opportunity Finder Agent | Extracts contract clauses, including escalation percentages, renewal caps, and payment terms, and forecasts future spend under the existing terms. | Price Escalations & Renewal Caps; Payment Terms Optimization |
| Supplier Optimization Opportunity Finder Agent | Analyzes supplier spend for fragmentation across suppliers and for spend with non-preferred suppliers. | Non-preferred Supplier Spend; Unconsolidated Spend; Spend Fragmentation; supplier performance and risk |
| Spend Optimization Opportunity Finder Agent | Analyzes purchase order activity for off-contract spend, unconsolidated spend, and other spend-side levers. | Off-Contract Spend; Contract Leakage |
The Savings Opportunity Finder Agents Scheduled Job runs the agents weekly. You can also run this scheduled job on-demand by entering sysauto.list in the navigation filter. Search for and open the Savings
Opportunity Finder Agents Scheduled Job, and then select Execute Now.
When the Savings Opportunity Finder Agents Scheduled Job runs, the Savings Opportunity Discovery agentic workflow uses all three agents and scans procurement data across contracts, suppliers, and purchase order lines and
creates records on the Savings Opportunities table (sn_spend_gen_ai_savings_opportunities).
Each opportunity record contains an estimated opportunity value, a savings lever, a confidence score, supporting data, and links to the suppliers, spend categories, and contracts the analysis drew from. Category managers review the opportunities, accept or dismiss them, and convert accepted opportunities into pipeline projects for tracking.
For more information about the fields on a savings opportunity record, see Savings opportunity fields.
Opportunity lifecycle
Each run generates new opportunities and reconciles existing ones according to the current state of the record:
- An open opportunity that has not yet been acted upon is updated in place when its underlying data changes. For example, when new closed purchase order lines change the estimated savings.
- A dismissed opportunity can reappear if fresh data changes the estimate enough to invalidate the original dismissal.
- A closed opportunity for which a pipeline project has been created is not re-created. For spend and supplier optimization, the next run can create a delta opportunity that reflects only the new data since the original was actioned.
Decision and action flow
Opportunities appear in two places in the Source-to-Pay Workspace: a unified Potential savings opportunities page that lists every opportunity accessible to the signed-in user, and a Category Management tab scoped to the spend category in context. From either entry point, the user opens the Now Assist Panel by selecting Learn more for a single opportunity to review supporting insights, ask clarifying questions, run simulations, and either action or dismiss the opportunity.
When an opportunity is presented, the category manager can:
- Open the opportunity in the Now Assist Panel to review details, ask follow-up questions, and simulate alternative values.
- Act on the opportunity by creating a pipeline project with key fields prefilled from the opportunity.
- Dismiss the opportunity with one or more reasons selected from a checklist.
Acted and dismissed decisions are captured as feedback to improve future opportunity generation.
For more information about actioning or dismissing a savings opportunity, see Action or dismiss a savings opportunity.
Roles and access
Access to savings opportunity records is governed by the following roles:
- sn_spend_mgmt.sourcing_category_manager: Read access to the Savings Opportunities (
sn_spend_gen_ai_savings_opportunities) table and records. - sn_spend_mgmt.category_manager_admin: Write access to opportunity records, and read and write access to the
sn_spend_gen_ai.savings_opportunity.cost_of_capitalsystem property.