Consulting in Procurement Strategy

Experts have long known that procurement is not just a service organization. Supported by the right supply chain strategy, objectives, structures and processes, your procurement can make a significant contribution to your company’s performance and add as much value as other departments within the company.

Develop your procurement organization with the right supply chain strategy

It is no longer a matter of cost-cutting alone, even though many companies focus primarily on this aspect of procurement performance. As a value creation partner, procurement provides significant contributions to your company’s innovation capabilities through supplier scouting.

Product innovations, such as in the automotive industry, are barely possible without strategic supplier partnerships initiated by your procurement department, and ever shorter product life cycles create new issues for procurement.

In addition, securing supply in volatile procurement markets is linked to continuous market monitoring and forecasts and remains an ongoing procurement task.

Both appropriate strategies and the suitable organizational anchoring of procurement are required to support and implement these diverse objectives.

There are different strategies you can deploy, but the first question is about transparency of those highly critical supply chains or components at an appropriate level of detail. A lot of businesses out there are struggling to understand [these], and they’re learning as and when these shortages happen.

Sushank Agarwal, Managing Director, INVERTO – a BCG Company

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How do we develop a procurement and supply chain strategy and your organization?

Developing procurement strategies

We have all the relevant procurement strategies needed to provide efficient support for our customers. Our strategy portfolio has different options for different issues: for example, developing a supplier base may be a priority for our customers, or they may need strategies which have an immediate effect on procurement costs. If required, our consulting services also include process improvements to increase performance or making changes to product or service

specifications. We develop the most efficient strategies for our customers’ business objective and specific situation. The results achieved during a procurement initiative must often be ensured by suitable organizational development to guarantee both sustainability and repeatability.

Building a state-of-the-art procurement organization

A professional procurement organization is essential to implementing strategic objectives successfully for the long term. We advise you on the orientation of your procurement organization and develop tailored solutions for your business. We actively support far-reaching transformation projects, such as extensive corporate restructuring, to the final implementation stage. Our consulting portfolio is extensive and ranges from designing

an organizational structure to job descriptions, from processes to resource planning. Our organization models are designed according to product groups and their degree of centralisation in order to capitalise on synergies, such as those created by pooling potential. The alternatives to be considered range from lead buyer approaches to developing global network structures and ‘local for local’ solutions. We support our customers to outsource procurement activities, to procurement companies for example. There is often also huge potential in process optimization. Standardizing strategic and operational processes makes them controllable and audit-proof. We consider possible support using e-tools during each individual stage: implementing electronic ordering catalogues, for example, can significantly improve processes and increase compliance rates.

Change management ensures successful implementation

A profound change in the organisation only works through the acceptance of all those involved and a sustainable anchoring of the new processes. Concepts alone are not enough. Rather, the change process must be steered by professional change management and accompanied from the idea to implementation. To ensure efficient and rapid implementation, the specialist departments must be motivated for the change and their performance potential

must be utilised for the implementation of a best-practice solution. This requires professional project management for the individual implementation steps of the change as well as a clear communication concept for all departments involved. Clear and open communication with regard to the upcoming changes and the inclusion of those involved are particularly important. Within the framework of change management, we take on the necessary communication tasks and, if necessary, monitoring or on-the-job coaching in addition to detailed implementation planning, thus ensuring professional implementation and sustainable anchoring in your company. To practise new processes or behavioural patterns in a newly designed organisation, we offer task-accompanying coaching in the day-to-day business of the procurement manager in his new role. Regular workshops, if necessary also cross-functional, enable feedback by the acting actors and provide information on the implementation progress.

Results of procurement strategy consulting

The procurement department is established in the company as a value creation partner
Optimized strategic and operational procurement and supply chain processes are supported by tools and implemented in the procurement organisation

Structured procurement review

Put your procurement organization to the test with us! With the findings of a structured and comprehensive procurement review, we create the basis for the right strategy development.

To the procurement review