In order to optimize its purchasing management process, an international operator needed to identify possible synergies between the different purchasing departments, particularly within its various subsidiaries, and thus generate savings.
Our client therefore called on our experts to:
- Set up the new format of the unified document which gathers the purchasing needs of the different subsidiaries for year n+1 under a financial, purchasing and technical prism.
- Define the purchasing convergences likely to generate savings.
Methodology
Initially, our team has worked with all purchasing teams in the various subsidiaries to align all calendars of different entities in order to identify purchasing needs.
This impacted the calendar of all the actors involved in the purchasing chain: technical teams, finance teams and finally purchasing teams.
At the same time, our Business Intelligence (BI) experts built a new tool to facilitate the aggregation of purchasing needs in the subsidiaries and implemented:
- A script to automatically produce a document aggregating all country requirements,
- A dynamic dashboard allowing to explore the needs and to build bundles,
- A Power BI report to visualize purchasing needs (dataviz), to communicate and thus refine the strategy to adopt.
The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the technologies, applications and practices for collecting, integrating, analyzing and presenting information. The objective of Business Intelligence is to support better decision making in the business, sales, marketing and finance verticals, based on data.
The data sources used to enrich BI tools can be multiple: Customer relationship management (CRM) systems, sales tracking information, marketing analytics, network probe data.... BI tools help companies bring all these disparate sources together into a single unified view providing real-time reporting, dashboards and analysis.
Result
The implementation of the new process allowed our customer to:
- Gain several months on the negotiations and thus not to pass through certain deals at the beginning of the year,
- Have a much clearer vision of the purchasing needs of its subsidiaries and thus be able to improve its negotiation strategy.
