UK electricity generator Powergen Plc has turned to Computer Management Group Plc to take its first steps at marketing its own software to the outside world, starting with an artificial intelligence system that is designed ti speed up and improve the procurement process. Procurement, by all accounts, is a can of worms. The contractor has first to finalise the desired specification, and then pick though half a dozen tenders which can offer similar things in thousands of different ways. Manually, this takes weeks. With the Intelligent Contract Management System, it takes a few hours. Powergen took the knowledge of six of its most experienced procurement people and input it into the system based on two forms of artificial intelligence: rule-based networks and neural networks. John Morris, project leader in Powergen’s computer department, explained why both are used: Data is run through the rule-based network to generate the contract conditions, and the neural net sifts through the complexities of the tenders. The MS-DOS starts at UKP30,000 and can be adapted for European Community procurement directives.
