Leading Additives Manufacturer Achieves Sourcing Excellence
In the competitive chemical manufacturing category, where many of the sourced commodities are negotiated on small margins, procurement excellence is measured beyond savings.
Overview
The client wanted to explore procurement transformation technologies that further equipped its sourcing team to optimize its impact as a strategic asset to the company.
Four years after integrating their maintenance system with an ERP system to manually execute on sourcing events through sending Excel spreadsheets, the client chose Arkestro as a means for streamlining manual processes associated with cost-savings activities and centralizing communication with internal stakeholders and participating suppliers.
Approach
Arkestro was deployed for an annual contract of valve hardware – a first for the client. Previously, these contracts were manually negotiated as-need as monthly spot buys, creating repetitive tasks and increased workload across the procurement team
Arkestro made a marked improvement in the client’s ability to drive savings by providing AI-generated recommended pricing to suppliers to properly set expectations. This ensures that the supplier understands up front how their offer will be evaluated. For the client, these forecasted pricing recommendations generated by Arkestro removes them from uncomfortable negotiations or misunderstandings and begins negotiations much closer to the desired result, minimizing the supplier’s ability to pad an initial offer to provide wiggle room for perceived savings.
The automated notification system within Arkestro provided the participating suppliers with clear next steps in the process. This reduced the procurement team’s need for manual check ins and follow ups, reducing the amount of time spent on a single sourcing activity.
As a cloud-based system, Arkestro’ intuitive interface allowed the client’s remote procurement team to quickly invite suppliers to participate, regardless of geographic location. The client also utilized the Arkestro pre-bid supplier survey feature. Capturing responses to a supplier’s ability to accept payment and lead time terms enabled the sourcing team to view best offers in an apples-to-apples comparison at the conclusion of the bidding event. This allowed the client to get from negotiation to award decision to purchase order quicker than ever before at scale.
Result
By executing the bidding event through Arkestro, the client was able to turn multiple weeks of unpredicted time annually into a four-day planned bidding process, freeing up their ability to execute more strategic sourcing projects for the organization throughout the year.
The initial first offers drove a 21% savings over the incumbent spend for the client. Shortly after receiving initial bids, the procurement team began brainstorming additional spend categories and line items to deploy with Arkestro.
Conclusion
The implementation of Arkestro unlocked a new level of productivity for the procurement function, further maximizing its strategic importance to the business and increasing its level of productivity.