Ports America selects GEP AI-driven spend analysis to bring enterprise-wide visibility
Ports America, the largest U.S. marine terminal operator and stevedore, has chosen GEP's AI-driven procurement software to solve a familiar operations problem: limited visibility into total enterprise spend. With 70+ locations across 33 ports and roughly 19 million TEUs handled each year, the company needed a single view of spend to guide decisions, reduce leakage and support scale.
Before this move, spend data lived in too many places - non-PO invoices, P-Card transactions and travel and expense systems. That fragmentation made it harder to expand spend under management, spot savings, consolidate suppliers and standardize pricing.
What the deployment changes
Ports America is implementing GEP's spend analysis to build a unified spend intelligence foundation that connects these disparate data sources. The outcome is clear visibility across major categories for procurement and operations leaders, with a scalable platform to support growth.
- Quantify savings: Identify and size opportunities across total spend.
- Improve control: Bring greater transparency to a complex, nationwide footprint.
- Negotiate smarter: Enable sourcing strategies and supplier negotiations backed by reliable data.
- Expose price variance: Uncover inconsistent pricing and address it fast.
- Equip the front line: Give site and production leaders actionable insights to make better calls.
Why operations leaders should care
Better spend visibility reduces surprises, shortens cycle times and strengthens supplier performance. It also helps you protect budgets, standardize what works and scale proven practices from one site to many.
In short, fewer one-off buys, clearer accountability and more leverage at the negotiating table.
How to convert visibility into results
- Unify the data: Connect non-PO invoices, P-Card feeds and T&E into a single model; lock down data refresh cadence.
- Standardize taxonomy: Agree on category definitions, suppliers, and GL mappings to cut noise.
- Cleanse and enrich: Normalize supplier names, classify tail spend and tag payment terms.
- Prioritize categories: Start with high-spend, high-variance areas and known maverick channels.
- Wire insights into process: Embed alerts into approvals and sourcing events, not just dashboards.
- Close the loop: Track savings to P&L, publish wins by site and update playbooks quarterly.
Metrics that matter
- Spend under management (% of total spend)
- Maverick spend reduction
- Savings pipeline and realized savings
- Price variance by SKU/category and contract compliance
- PO cycle time and invoice exceptions
- Supplier consolidation and payment terms improvement
About the GEP platform
GEP SOFTWARE includes GEP SMART™, GEP NEXXE™ and GEP GREEN™, powered by GEP Qi, an Agentic AI-native platform. It's built to drive efficiency, agility, visibility and actionable intelligence across procurement, purchasing and supply chain functions, while reducing infrastructure and support overhead to improve ROI.
The software features modern interfaces and flexible workflows to encourage adoption and productivity, and leverages machine learning, cognitive computing, advanced data and semantic technologies, IoT, mobile and cloud. It integrates quickly to support enterprise rollouts.
Context and quick references
Ports America handles approximately 19 million TEUs annually. If you want a refresher on what a TEU measures, this overview is helpful: What is a TEU.
To ground your program design, this overview of spend analysis fundamentals is a solid primer: Procurement analytics basics (CIPS).
Bottom line for ops
Distributed operations create data silos. Ports America's move to a unified spend intelligence layer is a practical way to get control, find savings and support consistent execution across sites.
If your team is building similar capabilities, start with clean data, clear taxonomy and a short list of high-value categories. Then wire insights directly into approvals and sourcing - where decisions actually get made.
Upskilling your team
If you're equipping operations and procurement teams to work with AI-driven analytics, explore focused learning paths: AI courses by job.
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