Axiom: Transforming tail spend, the autonomic way! 

Tail spend has been a nuisance for procurement functions for decades.

Often fragmented, cumbersome and individually low value spend, it’s traditionally been regarded as not worth the time and effort required to manage effectively. Yet, these small transactions quietly add up in the background, accounting for approximately a fifth of total procurement expenditure.

But as procurement continues to embrace an industry-wide transformation amidst a rapid deployment in AI across the board, the time is now to deal with the lingering challenge of tail spend.

Fortunately, Axiom is actively addressing this problem. 

Axiom has built a single ecosystem that handles everything from catalog purchasing to one-off supplier payments encompassing an ‘all in one place’ approach to make life easier for procurement teams. “The problem is that there are different component elements of tail spend,” explains Alistair Cane, Co-Founder and Director at Axiom. “There are elements that require sourcing, a robust catalog strategy and then there are the long tail where you just want to pay a new supplier.” 

Axiom has built a single ecosystem that handles everything from catalog purchasing to one-off supplier payments encompassing an ‘all in one place’ approach to make life easier for procurement teams. “The problem is that there are different component elements of tail spend,” explains Alistair Cane, Co-Founder and Director at Axiom. “There are elements that require sourcing, a robust catalog strategy and then there are the long tail where you just want to pay a new supplier.” 

“The challenge you have with other systems is that they are just handling a part of that. But when you think about it from the buyer’s journey, they want a complete end-to-end capability and not to have to jump from one platform to another. Within our tail spend solution, we have all of those modules beautifully integrated – a single place for the organisation to manage tail spend.”

Axiom is firmly customer-focused. It initially built the platform alongside Roche in 2021 which represented a significant step in catalog procurement. The platform not only fully digitises Roche’s global catalog content, but also revolutionises the buying process and experience, delivering real-time savings. Developed through deep collaboration over two years, this new procurement technology solution empowers organisations to establish, and seamlessly manage, their MarketPlace for any catalog content and related tail spend. Over time, Axiom’s product has evolved directly from the problems that clients raised.

“We worked with Roche closely to build the platform in the beginning,” explains Aaron Ueckermann, fellow Co-Founder and Director at Axiom. “That was our core MarketPlace and catalog management solution and that went live and we made continuous iterations on it. What we discovered is sometimes there’s things that just aren’t available in the catalog and users need to do one-off sourcing events to find new things or large quantities of existing things. So we launched MarketSource and that solved that gap.

“But we were then approached by another customer who said they wanted users to get things from inventory rather than buying something new. That caused us to develop our MasterMaterials and inventory management solution. We’ve continued on this theme across various modules and what we’ve found is we never really build anything just for the sake of a shiny feature for a demo. We always build off the back of customer problems so that we deliver something that they don’t currently have in their existing solutions.

“This has worked very well for us, but our next challenge is about ensuring we also place some big bets such as new product lines which customers aren’t immediately asking for where we’re looking ahead for new problems to solve. Keeping that balance is fun.”

Traditionally, purchasing cards (P-Cards) were used to streamline low-value transactions and help enable faster purchasing. These allowed for controlled spending, more efficiency and improved supplier relationships. However, one of the major drawbacks of P-Cards from a compliance perspective is that authorisation only happens retrospectively after the event has taken place.

This is where Axiom’s MarketPay solution comes in. MarketPay is built to handle the full tail spend flow instead of fragments of it. It operates on a disclosed procurement agency model – which means Axiom acts on the customer’s behalf instead of as an intermediary. Powered by its procurement agent, it automates the steps that typically slows everything down from validating request data to enforcing thresholds and compliance. Every payment also runs through a global payment account held in the customer’s name which allows the team to stay in control at all approval stages.

“MarketPay is essentially a disclosed procurement agent model,” explains Ueckermann.“What this means is that if you want to buy something from a supplier who you don’t currently work with or have contracted, you just upload a quote, specify an email address for who needs to receive the purchase order and then you send that off to the supplier. They onboard into Axiom and we take care of all the compliance requirements specific to the business before the supplier invoices through Axiom. But the key part is the legal relationship is still between the customer and the supplier. We see that the weakness of standard merchant of record models is that you end up buying through a third party, which can lead to compliance and tax issues, especially when it’s cross border. Now MarketPay resolves these, but it also keeps the simplicity and benefits of uploading a quote, specifying email address and getting paid.”

Modern procurement is changing quickly as new technologies come to the fore. Over the past 12 to 18 months, the biggest craze has been the rise of agentic AI and how agents are freeing procurement teams up to take on more strategic work. Cane believes the advancement of tools like agentic AI is redefining how the function lives and breathes. “One of the beauties of the Axiom platform is that there are multiple sides to the platform. There’s the buyer side, procurement portal and the supplier side, and the agent works across all of those. From a buyer perspective, ultimately what they want to do is source an item or a service as quickly as possible. If the agent can do a lot of the stuff that they would have had to do manually then that’s great for user experience. From the procurement side, it’s just removing and automating many of the tasks that procurement have often struggled with. One of the things with tail spend is the dynamic of you having 20% of your spend sitting with 80% of your transactions and often 80% of your resource. A lot of that resource in enterprise organisations are involved in administrative tasks managing this landscape. If the agent can do some of that heavy lifting from a mechanical perspective then that can only be a good thing.”

Axiom is passionate about AI. The organisation has even coined the term ‘autonomic sourcing’ to describe something beyond simply AI-assisted buying. “Our belief is that every single interaction and transaction in itself contains data and insight and we want to capture, understand and use this intelligence that sits around all the activities,” explains Cane. “The term autonomic sourcing is because it’s reflective of something that we all experience every day. The autonomic nervous system in the body controls the rate we breathe, our heart rate and the amount we blink. We do it without thinking and that’s exactly where we want to take the platform  so procurement doesn’t have to worry about the data that’s coming out of the platform. Let the platform analyse, understand as well as create insight, actions and outcomes. That, we believe, is the next generation of procuretech solutions.”

Find out more about Axiom here.