Developing Procurement Departments

Our Expertise:

This subject area centers around choosing the best structures and processes for procurement (i.e. organizing structures and procedures). Not only does this improve collaboration between departments, it also optimizes the framework for collaboration with your business units (cross-functional cooperation) and suppliers.

The Benefits:

• Double value:
  • Achieve greater savings and improve supply quality and security by means of agile structures and processes tailored to your company’s needs, so that procurement is optimally positioned for its core duties
  • Become more cost-efficient by optimizing the scale of your resources, thereby taking control of personnel costs in your procurement department
  • Stay flexible and improve response times so that you can adapt quickly to changing market conditions
     
• Confidence: By optimizing the scale of your resources and developing your procurement team, you can be confident of having sufficient capacity to deal with all of your important procurement tasks
   
• Reputation: Optimized structures/processes enable smooth collaboration within your procurement department, with business units, and with suppliers. This will noticeably improve your reputation among your procurement staff

Our expertise:

Strategic sourcing centers around two themes:

• Optimizing procurement terms for direct/indirect material groups, services, and capital goods
   
• Developing alternative supply sources to ensure supply security and innovative strength

The Benefits:

• Value enhancement: Achieve greater savings by consistently implementing your strategic procurement process
   
• Double confidence:
  • Enjoy the certainty of paying prices in line with the market, having exhausted every means of cutting costs, thereby achieving maximum savings
  • Reduce supply risk and increase the quality of the goods and services you buy by building up alternative supply sources

Our expertise:

Project purchasing is a form of organization commonly chosen in procurement, more specifically the interdisciplinary procurement process for complex and valuable products and services. Buyers (or a permanent team of buyers) manage all of the procurement activities as a whole, often collaborating closely with business unit representatives and suppliers. Project purchasing therefore places particularly high demands on the expertise of your staff.

The Benefits:

• Greater profits: Ensure that project purchasing is only applied to those procurement activities suited to it, and that products and services that are able to be combined are procured using better suited forms of organization
   
• Qualification: Develop the expertise of your workforce specifically for the complex demands of project purchasing. This will give you greater control and actively protect your business against supplier claims (claim management).
   
• Reputation: Improve the reputation of your procurement department by enabling it to expertly manage complex project tender processes, thereby contributing significantly to the success of projects

Our expertise:

The aim here is to optimize the entire process of operative and tactical procurement, thereby fully automating processes that are often still done manually, and standardizing them to a large degree.

Operative purchasing controls the process from ordering, to delivery logistics, to payment (order-to-pay / purchase-to-pay process).

Tactical purchasing forms the link between operative purchasing and strategic procurement. Once the supplier pool has been defined by strategic procurement, tactical purchasing invites the pool to bid for tenders, then selects suppliers. Operative purchasing then ensures that the order process runs smoothly.

The Benefits:

• Double value:
  • More efficient, streamlined processes increase the productivity of your procurement department and free up human resources
  • Defining order pathways (without loopholes) reduces levels of maverick buying. This creates savings, because you ensure that agreements with suppliers are actually fulfilled (savings aren’t just on paper, they're actually achieved)
     
• Confidence: Rest assured that auditing regulations are fulfilled, as the new processes are made audit-proof following consultation with all of the stakeholders

Our expertise:

The aim here is to organize your supplier base in the best possible way so that you can identify the right partners, develop connections, and thus activate potential for innovation and savings along your entire supply chain while eliminating supply and other business risks.

That’s why the focus is on building a system for evaluating and developing suppliers, as well as a procurement risk management system which addresses all of the relevant risk types (such as ecological risks, risks of human rights violations, supplier default risks, etc.) at an early stage.

The Benefits:

• Double value:
  • Achieve greater savings by constantly seeking ways of improving in close collaboration with the right suppliers. This will generate ideas about how to save, as well as innovations in processes, products, and other aspects of business, all of which can then be implemented
  • Cost and time benefits: Spend more time dealing with really important suppliers, since you will have evaluated all your suppliers and revealed clearly where procurement should invest its time and resources (e.g. personnel costs)
     
• Double confidence:
  • Enjoy the certainty of working with the best suppliers , who can fully meet your demands around sustainability, due diligence, financial stability, and more
  • Optimize your supply security by accurately monitoring supplier performance, then taking steps to develop those suppliers
     
• Reputation – because good supplier management shows that you appreciate your suppliers, and they tend to reward you for it. Working with suppliers who are treated as business partners is simply more enjoyable

Our expertise:

This field of activity is all about choosing the right tools and systems to digitalize and automate your procurement tasks and processes. It’s crucial that digital solutions are integrated optimally into your existing system landscape, so that you can derive maximum benefit from the potential of Procurement 4.0. At a strategic level, the focus is on utilizing newly acquired, high-quality information and procurement data as an aid to making decisions.

The focus at an operative level is on significantly increasing work quality and speed by means of state-of-the-art business intelligence and advanced analytics systems.

The Benefits:

• Information advantage: In-depth, automated analyses generate information that can be used as a valuable aid to decision-making by procurement and top management
   
• Greater quality and speed: The quality and speed of your processes will be significantly improved by optimizing your tools and IT systems The aim here is to have IT systems perform, using sets of rules that can be clearly conveyed, repetitive, time-consuming work processes that are prone to error, instead of your staff doing them. This ensures that your data, analyses, and decisions are always of the same high quality. Cycle times are improved and personnel costs are significantly reduced.

Our expertise:

The quality of data in procurement departments is often not what it should be. And yet a transparent data basis is essential if the overarching organization and processes at a strategic and operative level are to be made as efficient and effective as possible, and if you want to reach data-based, reliable procurement decisions. Only modern master data management can manage procurement properly and achieve aims  lastingly.

The Benefits:

• A robust foundation and prerequisite for transparent procurement management and efficient procurement work
   
• The confidence of knowing that procurement decisions are made on a sound data and factual basis

Our expertise:

The aim here is to define and achieve the workforce quality required to meet procurement targets. The focus is on identifying the strengths and development potential of the procurement workforce so that these can be developed in contexts such as coaching and on-the-job training, or in customized training programs involving important methods, procedures, and new processes and tools.

The Benefits:

• Value enhancement: Achieve greater savings by improving the quality and motivation of your procurement staff
   
• Confidence: Rest easy knowing you are utilizing your buyers in the best possible way
   

• Reputation: Properly trained and developed staff boost the reputation of procurement among the business units, and the procurement team enjoy their work more

Our expertise:

We help you to develop your procurement targets on the basis of your overarching corporate aims and strategy. Implement your defined aims by developing a procurement strategy. Using this procurement strategy, you can then derive clearly defined activities, responsibilities, and timetables. Implementing this procurement strategy establishes guiding principles for the direction your procurement is going to take. All other decisions, such as ones relating to procurement organization, have to be oriented around the defined procurement targets and procurement strategy.

The Benefits:

• Value enhancement:Concentrate on the right value drivers and potential savings, since procurement is now targeted and strategy-compliant, and you only pursue initiatives that actually help you achieve your aims and strategy
   
• Confidence: Ensure you always have the right focus and are able to prove to your management board and business units at any time that your procurement department is working in line with your corporate aims and strategy (“internal customer orientation”)
   
• Reputation: Enhance the reputation of your procurement department by making it focused and targeted, thereby contributing significantly to the success of your business

Our expertise:

The aim is to manage procurement proactively by establishing an automated and transparent KPI system, tracking procurement initiatives, measuring savings on the basis of profit and loss, and analyzing procurement volumes.

The Benefits:

• Confidence:
  • Board/management can measure and precisely steer procurement performance, in particular its contribution to profit and loss
  • Procurement managers are given a dependable, clean data basis, giving them full control of their work
  • Procurement teams are given the KPIs needed to manage their material groups and suppliers in real time, without having to jump back and forth between different Excel files, ERP systems, and operating interfaces
     

• Reputation: Measure savings comprehensively through efficient procurement controlling, so that you have clear proof of how your procurement department is contributing to the success of your business