Background
A leading global retailer, with revenues of €85bn in 2016, was looking to develop a new progress plan for 2020 for its Indirect Procurement Department. In France, indirect procurement accounts for €3bn in areas such as IT, energy, marketing and services.
The aim of the envisaged progress plan was to integrate several performance drivers and go beyond a pure trading approach, so as to reinforce the Department’s perceived value and operating performance.
To this end, the client was seeking an innovative, inspiring approach to stimulate and rally the entire procurement team around a shared and motivating set of goals.
Challenges
Alongside our client, Wavestone addressed several challenges, namely to:
- Identify and collectively prioritize new areas of improvement for the Indirect Procurement Department, so that implementation can be staggered between now and 2020.
- Raise the awareness of procurement teams to these new, and as yet unexplored, areas which are benchmark-driven and require a better knowledge of best market practices.
- Involve all players in the Indirect Procurement Department by applying an agile, innovative approach and encourage them to take concrete action by participating in sprint events.
Responses & Key Success Factors
Wavestone distinguished itself by:
- Interviewing several strategic suppliers and internal clients of the Indirect Procurement Department to get their views on possible areas of improvement.
- Working together with the client to develop a maturity analysis grid of the function with the procurement teams to enable them to carry out self-assessments at the individual, team and Management Committee levels and make them aware of their current level of maturity.
- Comparing the maturity of the Indirect Procurement Department at various levels (positioning, practices, tools and performance) against our benchmark of 40 major companies.
- Rallying the teams at the annual Indirect Procurement Department seminar (50 participants including a member of EXCOM) and assisting with the launch of the first progress sprint.
