Optimising your procurement department
When it comes to optimising a procurement department of any size, the strategic alignment of the procurement with the strategic goals of the business is essential. This is a fundamental part of our approach to optimising procurement within any business. Procurement can drive innovation, build resilience in the supply chain and reduce risk, and it must align with the strategic goals of the business. You can achieve this with our winning approach to procurement.
Opportunities assessment
Like many other functions in a business, you can’t optimise a procurement department without first understanding your current situation. This is your starting point.
We’ll begin by conducting an opportunities assessment, which involves speaking to your procurement department and the wider business to get a picture of your procurement structure.
We’ll learn about your suppliers, what type of relationship you have with them and how you manage your suppliers. We’ll analyse your spending. We’ll review your categories and contracts. Basically, we’ll try to learn everything there is to know about your business to help us identify opportunities to optimise your procurement.
Observations and recommendations
After conducting our opportunities assessment, we’ll make a series of observations that focus on core areas of improvement in your procurement function. We’ll highlight key aspects you can enhance and suggest possible measures to implement within our extensive recommendations.
We’ll also make a forecast regarding the savings you could make, and we’ll draw to your attention any additional benefits you can reap from the improvements, besides cost reduction. There’s more to procurement than just keeping spending under control.
Strategic alignment
As part of our opportunities assessment, we look to see if your procurement strategy and processes are aligning with the overarching strategy of the business. Are you missing out on opportunities to align your procurement with the organisation’s business strategy? Are you overlooking opportunities for procurement to benefit other departments? We’ll look at core areas of your procurement to establish whether this is the case.
Another question we’ll ask is whether you have the resources to meet your requirements and help the business to achieve its goals? Do you have a procurement department? If so, is it large enough to handle its current responsibilities? Are extra tasks weighing down employees and distracting them from their main responsibilities?
Tender exercise
A tender exercise, which we’ll conduct, will help you to reduce your costs. We’ll also use this exercise to produce a report in which we make further recommendations you could implement. We’ll look at issues such as tail spend management and whether you’re overlooking the lower value transactions in the business; whether your supply chain can cope with the changing needs of the business; digital procurement opportunities and how digital procurement could benefit your business; and opportunities to reduce costs by reviewing current contracts.
Implementation
We don’t just analyse your procurement, suggest ways to improve it and then leave you to struggle to implement the recommendations provided. We understand just how complex procurement is and want to be sure you gain maximum return on your investment. Whereas many consultancies leave it to the clients to implement measures, we put them in place for you, going that extra step to set you up for success and enable you to navigate procurement confidently.
