Shawn Oleson

Special Guest Blog Post written by Bernadine Henderson Ms. Henderson, senior director of procurement at Protolabs, lifts the lid on buying in manufacturing and why relationships are central to it.   Simply put, the job of a buyer is really about buying the right thing at the right time for the right price. It sounds simple, but it really is very complicated because everything that’s going on in the world impacts the timing, the availability, and the price of the product. This means that buying has recently got a lot more complicated. World events have very real consequences on global supply chains. Just one example is the way in which buyers have responded to tariffs in the U.S. by re-routing sourcing locations. It takes a certain amount of agility to be a buyer in 2025, and this quick responsiveness is helped along by one key ingredient, and that is strong relationships with suppliers. Relationships Built on Trust A widely held misconception is that buyers are only interested in getting to the lowest price possible. In fact, the most important thing to a buyer is for suppliers to bring solutions that deliver overall value. In my experience, a really strong supplier…

Companies are rapidly integrating generative AI into procurement and sourcing decisions. The promise is obvious. AI can read thousands of pages of supplier proposals faster than any human team, summarize technical requirements in seconds, and create the appearance of consistency and objectivity in evaluation. But there is an important distinction managers are starting to overlook. The same AI system that performs extremely well at identifying whether a supplier meets minimum requirements may perform much less reliably when judging which supplier is truly better. Recent research published in the Journal of Business Logistics examined this issue by comparing how large language models evaluated supplier bids against evaluations completed by experienced procurement professionals. It analyzed 123 supplier proposals tied to 31 public procurement projects conducted by the State of Ohio between 2023 and 2024. The projects involved complex IT services contracts, many containing large, text-heavy bid packages requiring evaluative judgment rather than simple arithmetic comparisons. The researchers tested three reasoning-oriented AI models: OpenAI o3, Grok-3-Mini, and DeepSeek R1. They then compared their evaluations against human procurement scores. The findings revealed a surprisingly clear pattern. AI performed well when evaluating compliance signals. These are signals tied to baseline qualifications and technical requirements. Does…