Webinar recording: Successful cost reduction in practice – How SW achieves measurable savings through AI-driven negotiations and RFQs

Procurement organizations are currently facing the challenge of having to offset rising labor costs and geopolitical risks while simultaneously dealing with margin pressure. Manually preparing data for negotiations is often too time-consuming to react quickly to market volatility with well-founded counterarguments.

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Matthias Schlotter (Director of Procurement at Schwäbische Werkzeugmaschinen), Melinda Behncke (Head of Marketing & Growth at Tacto), and Constantin Blome (Product Manager at Tacto) demonstrate in this webinar how SW uses specialized AI agents to automate data preparation and systematically increase competitive pressure within their supplier portfolio through digital RFQs.

Initial Situation

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The market environment in mechanical engineering is characterized by below-average capacity utilization and unpredictable price fluctuations in logistics. At SW, these external factors led to unplanned cost increases that could not be fully passed on to customers. Prior to the transition, a lack of centralized documentation for negotiation results and limited access to external benchmarks made it difficult to consistently achieve savings targets.

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Automated Negotiation Preparation

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‍By using a negotiation agent, relevant KPIs and cost breakdowns are generated for the procurement team without any manual effort. For a screw-in connection, for example, the system identified price increases of up to 106% over the last 36 months. By comparing this with over 20,000 external indices, it was possible to prove that the supplier's demands were consistently above the market average, which enabled a precise price revision.

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Digital RFQ Processes to Strengthen Competition

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‍An RfQ agent helps streamline the tendering process with minimal administrative effort. Digitalization makes it possible to invite significantly more suppliers per request and compare quotes directly. This increases the share of competitive purchasing volume and secures better market prices for SW in the long term.

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Centralized controlling for all savings initiatives

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‍To keep track of every lever, from supplier shifts to cost avoidance, SW uses a centralized management system. AI-driven insights help the procurement team identify potential early on and document all results in an audit-proof "single source of truth." This relieves the strategic team of manual routine tasks, allowing them to focus on actively achieving savings targets.

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Conclusion

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The SW case study demonstrates that successful cost reduction today requires moving away from manual Excel analyses toward a data-driven organization. The key is to provide the procurement team with the right tools to act quickly and fact-based in volatile markets.

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In this webinar, Matthias Schlotter, Melinda Behncke, and Constantin Blome show how SW uses automated data analysis and targeted AI agents to factually challenge price increases. The experts illustrate how digital RFQ processes increase competitive pressure without adding administrative burden and why centralized tracking of all initiatives sustainably secures strategic impact in procurement.