Top Innovators
Doug Lazar is Manager of Supply Chain Operations at Portland General Electric. Veda Dharmala is Manager of Application Development, Enterprise Data Strategy at Portland General Electric. Manoj Kumar is a Data Scientist at Portland General Electric. Thana Anderson is Supply Chain Procurement Specialist at Portland General Electric.
Portland General Electric won the Fortnightly Top Innovator 2025 award ''Nikola Tesla Top Innovator in Artificial Intelligence'' for its AI-Powered Purchase Order Audit Bot.
PUF's Kerry Worthington: Describe your innovation and its positive impact.
Doug Lazar: The solution we delivered is an AI-powered purchase order (PO) Audit Bot. It automates review of our procurement transactions to ensure they align with our negotiated contract rates, terms, and system process in terms of efficiency around the end-to-end life cycle.
Veda Dharmala: It was a collaborative effort of both our teams. At PGE, we focus on serving our customers and keeping their bills as low as possible. We do that by lowering operating costs. That's by avoiding errors and overcharging.
Innovation is core to our PGE strategy. With demand growth and customer-driven clean energy goals, we should continue to innovate. PGE is really into this innovation space. Day in, day out we worked on training the bot to make sure it's accurate. That's where our focus was.
Doug Lazar: The Audit Bot takes the manual workload that Thana Anderson, Supply Chain Procurement Specialist, would do and automates it, so rather than looking at one percent or so of the audited transactions, the Bot evaluates up to one hundred percent of procurement transactions much faster.