COUPA, KIMBERLY-CLARK & KPMG
“ AS PART OF THIS GLOBAL IMPLEMENTATION, WE PUT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
FRONT AND CENTRE”
Suresh Sundaram Director, Aurora Global Deployment
Kimberly-Clark
For Laxmi Kumar Veluru, Senior Materials Manager at Kimberly-Clark, the value shows up in the small frictions AI removes from daily work.“ When AI is embedded, it basically reduces the hunting and guessing work in day-to-day tasks, and when it categorises the spend, it makes things much quicker,” Laxmi says.“ It helps automate the mundane tasks, and that helps make quicker decisions, too.”
None of that works, Laxmi is careful to add, without discipline underneath it.“ It delivers the value at scale only when your basics are rock solid,” he says.“ You have proper integrations in place, a very good taxonomy, and great master data. We had to first clean up the master data to make sure AI delivers on that.”
Redefining the work, not reducing the people For all the automation Aurora introduced, Kimberly-Clark’ s leaders pointed out what the programme was, and was not, designed to do.“ It wasn’ t about reducing our workforce,” Dawn says.“ It was about focusing the right people on the right activities.”
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