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Multi-Category
ABF Transforms Freight & Logistics Procurement with Keelvar
Direct materials
Keelvar for direct materials
Direct materials sourcing means balancing cost, quality, supplier reliability, risk, and sustainability — all at once. Keelvar gives you the tools to optimize across all of it, at scale.
Trusted by industry leading procurement teams globally
What direct materials teams can expect to achieve with Keelvar
$247M
in savings in 2 years
400x
ROI achieved in 2 years
67%
of sourcing events fully automated
<15 min
to complete an automated sourcing event
Better sourcing outcomes for direct materials
Commodity prices shift. Supply constraints appear overnight. A wrong award decision is costly. Keelvar gives your team the optimization and automation to make better decisions, faster — without the manual work.
Make award decisions based on total value, not just price
Model award scenarios across cost, risk, quality, sustainability, and supplier capacity simultaneously — so every decision reflects the full picture.
When commodity prices shift or supply constraints hit, trigger new sourcing events automatically — without waiting for manual intervention.
Build best practices once, apply them everywhere
Create sourcing workflows for your key direct materials categories and reuse them across steel, packaging, chemicals, and more — consistently, at scale.
Run more events without adding headcount
Automate bid invites, supplier reminders, data validation, and conditional awarding. Your team focuses on the decisions that need them.
Dynamic feedback shows suppliers where they stand in real time — driving better bids and stronger competition across every direct materials event.
Do you need a tool that can handle the complexity of direct materials sourcing?
Keelvar is built for the sourcing events most tools can't handle — and the high-volume events most teams don't have time for.
Keelvar features
We couldn’t fit them all on a webpage. But here are the features your team will ask about first.
Request a demoWhat they say about us
Optimization was the number one reason we chose Keelvar. We needed a solution that could handle our complex sourcing needs and provide the insights we required to make the best decisions
$65bn
spend optimized
“Anybody can create a software tool to house data. It’s the analytics that tipped the scale back in 2019, and it’s the reason we’re still using Keelvar 6 years later. Anything we can do to help stabilise or drive down costs during tariff changes or shipping disruptions has been very valuable to us.”
$440M
savings in 2 years from $7.5bn spend
“You don't even have to train the teams to use it. You now have [an agent] do all the work of building and creating the events for you.“
$64M
savings in 1 year
Get in touch
FAQs
Straight answers to common questions about Keelvar.
Direct materials are the inputs that go directly into a manufactured product — raw materials, components, sub-assemblies, and ingredients. Sourcing them involves complex tender processes with multiple suppliers, volume dependencies, geographic constraints, and significant financial risk. Getting direct materials sourcing right has a direct impact on production cost and supply continuity.
Keelvar is built for the complexity of direct materials. A single tender may involve hundreds of line items across multiple supplier options, with conditional pricing, volume bundling, and geographic constraints. Keelvar models every possible combination of awards and identifies the optimal solution based on your defined objectives — cost, supply diversification, preferred supplier relationships, or a weighted combination of all three.
Keelvar supports structured multi-round events with configurable parameters for each round. After an initial bid, suppliers receive traffic light feedback indicating the competitiveness of their offer, and the event moves to a second round. Each round is designed to drive genuine competitive tension without exposing confidential bid data. Across Keelvar customers, traffic light feedback generates 8–12% additional savings per round.
Award scenario analysis in Keelvar lets teams model the cost implications of supply concentration versus diversification. A team can compare an award that gives the lowest total price — concentrated with two suppliers — against an award that distributes volume across four suppliers for resilience, and see the cost of that risk mitigation in real terms. This makes supply risk a quantified input to the decision, not an afterthought.
Yes. Keelvar supports integration of external benchmark data — market price indices, historical rates, and reference data — directly into bid analysis. This allows teams to evaluate supplier bids against an external market reference and identify bids that fall significantly outside market norms, either because a supplier has priced aggressively or has made an error.