Sourcing and procurement is a critical business function that has significant and direct impact on bottom-line performance.
Procurement spend can account for as much as 50 percent of an organization’s total annual expenditure. Savings attained through effective sourcing and procurement practices enable companies to reinvest in growth, personnel, facilities and equipment to drive improved performance.
As a result, companies are challenging their procurement teams to play an increasingly important role in managing spend and optimizing end-to-end sourcing and procurement processes across the company.
With the numerous external challenges that can affect your organization everyday – tools to enable optimal remote work can help minimize or prevent disruption in your sourcing and procurement operations.
Holistic Sourcing and Procurement Approach
We have developed a holistic approach that combines strategy, governance and execution to not only drive benefits, but also sustain and improve them over time. A key tenet of our approach is balancing direct savings initiatives with building world-class, sustainable procurement capabilities within a company’s procurement processes, organizational structures, and technology solutions.
It is not enough to drive one-time savings. It is more important to establish effective capabilities within a procurement organization to achieve continual savings.
Sourcing and Procurement Services
Our Sourcing and Procurement Service capabilities include:
Sourcing and Procurement Transformation
We work with organizations to successfully transform sourcing and procurement departments to meet internal and external needs. We use a proven phased approach to address key components of this transformation, starting with an experience-based assessment and followed by parallel delivery of savings and sustaining capabilities. We then work with you to develop and implement a roadmap to successfully streamline processes and improve business functions.
Spend Analysis and Opportunity Assessment
We work with organizations to understand spend categories and identify strategies to reduce costs. Procurement covers a broad array of spend and subcategories with specific importance varying by industry and organization. Segmenting spend and applying the appropriate category management and sourcing strategy is critical to the success of a procurement organization.
Strategic Sourcing
We understand the challenges of strategic sourcing and help companies align their strategies with the goals of the enterprise. We create flexible frameworks to respond faster in volatile market conditions. This flexibility plays a key role in a company’s ability to respond to the evolving needs of customers.
Procure To Pay Process Improvement
We understand that procurement transactions need to be fast, error-free and dependable. We show organizations how to gain full visibility over the lifecycle of a transaction and make improvements for positive change. This is achieved by analyzing performance against best practices, discovering gaps and developing a roadmap to optimize the process.
Contract Management and Compliance
We help clients control spend and ensure contract compliance through development of measures and controlling activities. Our experts combine diverse industry backgrounds with current industry benchmarking data to identify costs savings and manage risk associated with poorly-written contracts.
Supplier Management and Partnering Programs
Three critical supply chain measures are quality, cost and time. Each of these measures can be improved through proper management of suppliers. We help clients identify the proper type of supplier relationship for a purchase and develop recommendations to improve these measures.
Governance and Organization
A key attribute for any world-class procurement practice is a strong and user-friendly set of policies and procedures as well as the controls to monitor them. We use a spend-centric approach to help our clients define the appropriate structure (centralized, de-centralized, or central-led) for core spend categories. Our experts also help define roles and responsibilities of various stakeholder groups that manage spend across your organization.
Technology Enablement
We work with clients to select, configure and implement software solutions to optimize their value chain. Our experts gain a deep understanding of your technology needs and develop a high-level application architecture along with supporting requirements. As a part of this architecture, we help you realize the benefits of past and future technology investments – like sourcing tools, procure-to-pay solutions, and contract management.
Sourcing and Procurement Process
Effective sourcing and procurement needs to consider an end-to end-perspective:
Although many companies have initiated sourcing and procurement improvement programs in the past, many continue to face significant challenges in attaining and sustaining procurement savings. Challenges include:
- Attaining accurate and complete visibility of spend across company
- Leveraging scale across diverse divisions and operating groups (purchasing power)
- Segmenting spend and applying the appropriate category management and sourcing strategy to each category (centralized, central-led, decentralized)
- Outlining clear ownership, accountability and fiscal responsibility on spend management
- Driving efficiency and effectiveness of procure-to-pay processes and clarity of roles and responsibilities
- Managing risks associated with poorly written contracts
- Controlling spend and ensuring contract compliance across the organization
- Realizing benefits of past and future technology investments
- Building and retaining procurement skills and category expertise in strategic spend areas
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Operational Excellence Services
Learn more about our operational excellence approach by exploring each of our services:
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