Transformation and Consulting
Our procurement transformation service offers a complete solution to organisations seeking to deliver a step-change in procurement performance.
Our structured approach to diagnostics rapidly identifies the issues, capability gaps and opportunities within your existing structures, processes, people and systems and this results in a costed, resourced and prioritised improvement plan which sets out the steps required to adopt best practices and improve performance.
Our transformation programs bring together a number of key elements to enable successful and sustainable change:
- Vision, leadership and sponsorship
- Target Operating Models aligned to business drivers
- Effective Program Management – planning, resourcing, issue management and reporting
- Governance and policy development
- Customer alignment, demand planning, budgeting and forecasting processes
- Recruitment, skills assessment and talent management
- Procure-to-Pay process development
- Procurement systems, tools and knowledge management
- Strategic Sourcing Processes and Category Management
- Supplier Relationship Management and Contract Management
Over the years we have helped many organisations to transform their procurement capability and as a result have delivered significant cost and performance benefits on behalf of our clients. Playing a key role in programme management and advising on areas such as role, governance and mandate we work alongside our clients in developing the people, processes and systems necessary to deliver an effective capability. In parallel, we typically deploy resource to support cross-functional sourcing projects aimed at delivering cost reductions and providing a return on investment.
Private Equity
SourceXchange has significant experience in working with Private Equity owned businesses to deliver procurement savings which are a natural area of focus in enabling an improvement in the enterprise value of the organisation.
We are able to deploy high calibre resource to support Private Equity teams in sizing and delivering the savings opportunities to deliver equity value uplift. Indeed, the alignment of owner, stakeholders and management often enables a much easier delivery of savings.
The services we typically offer are:
- Pre-acquisition due diligence to assess current capabilities and identify potential savings goals
- Detailed spend analysis and opportunity assessment to develop plans and identify potential savings at a category level
- Managed sourcing programs to create teams and deploy resources to deliver category plans and savings opportunities
- Procurement transformation to develop the structures, processes, tools and people to enable and sustain longer term performance
We work closely with our customers to build a package of support around your specific needs. Our confidence in being able to deliver real savings, quickly, means that we can link our remuneration to the success we achieve.
Commissioning
Effective commissioning is at the heart of enabling successful procurement and management of supply markets. The critical role of identifying needs and designing coherent services is essential to establishing an effective and optimised fit with the supply market. We have helped a number of public sector organisations as they seek to develop their commissioning capabilities, processes and develop core skills in areas such as service design, customer journey mapping and systems thinking.
Category Management
Our approach to Category Management yields proven results in delivering sustainable cost reduction to our clients by leveraging best practice tools and techniques. Our structured approach is centred around meeting the needs of the business and cross-functional involvement to ensure full stakeholder support. When this approach is linked to a deep understanding of supply markets, this enables organisations to deliver a step change in their procurement outcomes. We have significant expertise in helping organisations develop and embed process, including best practice tools, which incorporate your own language and reflects your ways of working.
We are able to help in setting up category management structures, working with you to develop appropriate governance structures, category maps and coding architecture in procurement systems. Our experience in organisational development enables us to support you in ensuring you have the organisational structure, roles and skills to make category management effective. We achieve this by using tools such as competence-based assessment and underpin this with e-learning, classroom tutorial, coaching and project support.
Supplier Relationship Management and Contract Management
Research has shown that the benefits of sourcing are often short lived if organisations aren’t able to then effectively manage the contract and agreements that are established with their suppliers. However, supplier performance management also ensures that value delivery continues for the life of the contract and expectations are met. The process may even extend to supplier development where effective contract management becomes the basis for further developing performance and continuous improving and refining how the parties work together. In this context, further value can be derived beyond that originally contracted for.
Effective contract and supplier performance management becomes more important as organisations increasingly focus on their core competencies and outsource a greater percentage of their work and services to others. This increases both dependency and risk on the organisation’s supply chains.
Our approach to contract management and building supplier relationship management competence leverages our deep expertise as practitioners in managing contracts and performance. We are able to help customers in a number of different areas including:
- Establishing governance structures, policy and guidance to enable organisations to work seamlessly and in an integrated manner to manage the various components of a contract and supplier relationship
- Establishing contract management processes and toolkits
- Developing Supplier Relationship Management processes and toolkits to measure relationships and develop improvement plans
- Developing supplier performance and contract management templates
- Helping to develop Service Level Agreements, performance measures and metrics
- Develop contract management competency frameworks and improve supplier performance management skills
- Performing contract reviews and supplier performance health checks
Agile Procurement and Agile Contracting
As the competitive landscape has become more demanding, product life cycles get shorter and organisations are under pressure to deliver projects more quickly, organisations have demanded that procurement teams adapt to become much more nimble and responsive in order to reduce the typical acquisition cycle time.
Agile procurement is positioned to be the driver of this adaptability, bringing together procurement practitioners with subject matter experts, other stakeholders and suppliers to collaborate and co-design solutions. This approach seeks to move a typical paper led or eRfx based tendering process and moves it into a workshop type environment where the solutions are developed and refined through the interactions of those present. This iterative approach allows ideas to be developed, challenged and tested within a much shorter timeframe.
The key differences in an agile based approach are:
- Co-design of the solution in conjunction with the potential supplier(s)
- Move the tender process from paper to workshop based
- Co-design the solution, using the supplier’s expertise, as part of a cross-functional team
- Make the processes iterative rather than sequential
- Using ‘pilots’ as a means to inform selection
- Multiple short steps in defining specification, refining needs, solutions, measures, cost models
Traditional procurement involves fixed deliverables, extensive documentation and a comprehensive project plan. However, we have helped numerous organisations adapt their typical procurement practices to apply agile principles and use pricing models which incentivise success.
Project and Interim Support
We are able to deploy high calibre resource to support all of your procurement requirements. Drawing upon either our own dedicated team of consulting resource we can provide a wide range of talent to meet your needs, whether that is in supporting a systems implementation, augmenting an existing team to help accelerate savings delivery, supporting a specific project, accessing specialist category knowledge or in providing temporary cover for an existing member of the team. We draw upon a pool of candidates from which many have been known to us for years and have successfully undertaken several client engagements during this time. This ensures a deeper understanding of the strengths of each individual and their personal attributes to enable a better client fit.