Industry
Management Consulting
Headquarters
New York, NY, US
Employees
50k – 100k
Founded
1926
Testimonial
“We had built 15 procurement categories and needed a news engine that could map relevant updates directly to each one to help us deliver targeted supplier news to our clients. What impressed us was how cleanly Contify handled that. Structured output, proper entity tagging, and noise removal that actually worked at scale. That is exactly what we were looking for from an API partner.”
– Data Engineering Manager, Global Management Consulting Firm
Executive summary
The firm had an internal procurement analytics platform to support the supply chain advisory practice. They wanted to add a supplier intelligence automation layer to it, which could track 100+ suppliers across various clients, divided into 15 internally defined procurement categories (e.g., raw materials, logistics, manufacturing, quality standards). The goal was to access a continuously updating, well-organized feed of strategic supplier news, categorized according to internal definitions. Getting there was harder than it looked.
Manual news gathering couldn’t keep up. Building a data pipeline in-house looked feasible in theory, but the scope made it hard to justify. Sourcing strategic updates for over 100+ suppliers, organizing them into self-defined procurement categories, filtering out duplicates, and handling content in multiple languages would have consumed months of engineering capacity, with ongoing maintenance on top.
They turned to Contify’s Business News API. In just 60 days, they built an internal supplier intelligence solution that delivered an always-current news stream with no noise, categorized into 15 tailored procurement dimensions. What had been a slow, manual process for analysts to fulfill for their clients became automated.
About the company
The firm is one of the leading management consulting firms, advising corporations, governments, and institutions on strategy, operations, and transformation. Client engagements frequently involve supply chain restructuring, vendor risk management, and procurement strategy at a scale where the quality of underlying intelligence has direct consequences.
Within this organization, analysts operate a procurement analytics platform to support the supply chain advisory practice. They aimed to integrate an automated supplier intelligence layer that tracked multiple suppliers, organized news by procurement category, and provided clean data for their analytics workflow, which could be distributed to clients. The platform outputs produced were used by clients for decision-making. This made relevance, freshness, and correct categorization of intelligence necessary requirements that couldn’t be compromised.
The challenges
- Manual research was not keeping up
The team’s existing approach relied on analysts doing their own searches across Google and third-party sources. Without a dedicated business news API for supplier monitoring, analysts would search for supplier news and manually shortlist relevant updates. At a small scale, it held up. But as the number of tracked suppliers grew and spread across more procurement categories, the time required made it unsustainable. The team was spending hours gathering information that should have arrived automatically.
- Clients needed organized intelligence, not raw news
The issue was not only with volume but also with relevance and structure. A story about a supplier’s factory operations meant something very different depending on whether it involved logistics disruptions, raw material availability, quality compliance, or regulatory actions. The generic news aggregator APIs and tools they evaluated returned undifferentiated article feeds that analysts had to read, interpret, and categorize manually before they could be useful.
- Building in-house had its own limitations
The team explored building a proprietary news pipeline. The requirements for building supplier news automation in-house became clear quickly: scrapers for hundreds of supplier websites, entity recognition to match articles to specific companies, a deduplication layer to remove noise, category tagging, and multilingual content handling. The engineering capability was there, but committing those resources from the core platform to the new infrastructure and its ongoing maintenance on top would’ve shifted the focus.
Contify’s solution
1. Customized taxonomy tags on retrieved content
We created customized taxonomy tags for API output datasets based on the customer’s procurement-specific internal categorizations, enabling automated supplier intelligence across all defined dimensions. In total, 15 category tags were introduced, such as raw materials, logistics, manufacturing, and quality standards.
2.Custom source integration for fetching information from niche sites
The data team at the firm incorporated procurement-specific trade publications and industry portals directly into their feed via the get/request-source endpoint, going beyond Contify’s pre-configured source network of 1 Mn+ sources to capture information on suppliers, even from niche websites.
3. Noise-free content delivery across hundreds of suppliers
Tracking 100+ suppliers creates a volume problem fast. Contify addressed this at the source. Every story passes through a multi-step deduplication and entity disambiguation process, so if a supply chain event was covered across dozens of publications, the client received one relevant update rather than dozens. Advanced filtering also allowed the analysts to exclude off-topic content at the point of retrieval, ensuring that what reaches the firms’ clients is genuinely relevant.
4. AI-generated highlights so analysts can act, not just read
Contify automatically generates AI-powered key highlights for every story and distributes them in API output, condensing each article into quick, scannable bullet points. The firm’s clients no longer needed to read full articles to assess strategic value. They could review the highlights, identify what mattered, and act on it immediately.
5. Global supplier intelligence from non-English sources with auto-translations
The firm’s clients had a global supplier network, and hence, news beyond English-language sources was a critical evaluation parameter for any news API for supplier monitoring. Contify delivered content from over 250,000 non-English sources across 117+ languages, with automatic translation applied so that regulatory updates and supplier developments from markets in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere arrived in English. For the firm’s clients, this meant coverage that reflected where suppliers actually operate, not just where they publish in English.
- Clean integration into existing workflows
The API’s structured JSON output connected to the team’s existing platform without significant engineering work on either side – making supplier intelligence automation operational within days. Contify’s customer success team stayed involved throughout setup, helping configure categorization and relevance parameters and resolving questions as they arose.
Key results
- Supplier intelligence flowing within weeks
Initial news feeds were running within the first week of deployment, making supplier intelligence automation materially useful. Full category configuration and relevancy testing wrapped up shortly after, bringing total setup time to under 60 days from contract close. Contify’s support and documentation enabled a move from pilot to production without a prolonged implementation cycle, which was important for a team with competing priorities.
- Analysts focused on deeper analysis, not article triage
Pre-categorized supplier news and AI-generated highlights reshaped how analysts used the firm’s procurement analytics platform. Instead of spending time reading raw article feeds to identify what was relevant and manually sharing it with clients, they now deliver organized, summarized intelligence to their clients automatically. This shift freed up meaningful hours each week for deeper analysis and supporting clients on higher-order decisions.
- No gaps in global coverage across suppliers
With automatic translation built into the API, the firms’ clients gained consistent visibility into supplier developments across markets. International regulatory filings and regional supply chain news arrived in the same structured format as English-language content, giving a more complete view.
- Engineering team stayed focused on the core platform
Choosing to buy rather than build protected the firm’s engineering capacity. No scrapers to maintain when supplier websites changed, no deduplication models to retrain, no edge cases to debug as the supplier list expanded. Technical resources stayed focused on the procurement analytics platform itself, the work that actually mattered for the team.
Impact
| Aspect | Result |
| “Time-to-live” for supplier intelligence workflow in the platform | Under 60 days |
| No. of suppliers tracked through Business News API | 100+ |
| Custom procurement categories configured at launch | 15 |
| Reduction in time spent on manual supplier research | 70% |
| Hours saved per analyst per week | 15+ |
| Speed of procurement insight delivery to clients | 2x faster |
Try Business News API for free
If your team is building a supplier intelligence platform, a procurement analytics tool, or any internal application that needs clean, categorized, analysis-ready business news data at scale, Contify’s Business News API is designed for it.
To get started, connect with our experts to discuss your specific use case or explore our APIs with a 7-day free trial.
