Previous Solution

None

Industry  

Procurement (Long Tail Spend)

Use case

To aggregate marketplaces and push into MNC procurement

In this MNC thought leadership episode, we are interviewing Shirley Mower from DHL Procurement with a series of interview questions:

What is your role in the organization?

I am the APAC Regional Sourcing Manager for a category of spend that covers a lot of low value consumables.

What are some of the challenges you have seen in your years of experience in this space?

Managing consumable sourcing has a number of challenges all wrapped up in ‘how to source low value items in a strategic manner’! One key way is to bundle spend and provide suppliers with volume which gives us negotiation leverage for contracting. This ‘traditional’ approach provides suppliers with a size of prize that make them interested in contracting with us and has worked for many years allowing us to manage price, quality, delivery, payment terms and makes any purchase compliant to all the relevant company policies. But even with all this extra ‘value’ we bring - we still see non-compliant spend occurring within the business with purchasing outside of the contract and with the embracement of online shopping in Asia many of our internal stakeholders compare our contracted rates to local online shopping marketplaces – which are often lower.

What are the solutions you or your organization have implemented in solving these organization challenges?

DPDHL has been driving the ‘digitalisation’ focus for a few years now and in Asia Pacific we identified SourceSage as a supplier who could provide a digitalised approach to resolve our low value, non-compliant spend challenges.

Once selected the item/s moves into our purchasing system and follows the approval process, if approved the PO is raised and the goods are ordered. There is no no reason to buy outside of the system - all spend has a PO, has followed our approval process and most importantly is transparent to the finance team prior to spend. We have effectively used this digitalisation to funnel all spend into a compliant process, whilst still offering flexibility! Win, win for all.

What are some of the bottlenecks or obstacles in the course of innovating within a large organization?

Definitely there has to be value to the innovation – the business is not interested in innovation ‘just because’ – it could be a really cool idea but there has to be value to the organisation and a return on investment that ticks all the boxes. As a global company, it is imperative that any IT integration meets the strict DPDHL requirements – this can sometimes be seen as an obstacle to implementation but it is necessary evil. Bottlenecks are predominantly around local engagement – bringing our business partners along for the ride and making sure that the processes we want to implement meet the local business and country legislative requirements. Sometimes the big ship takes a while to turn – but when it embraces innovation we are all winners!

What are some of the trends or innovations you are seeing in the space?

From my view point, we are seeing more and more automation – improving efficiencies and productivity, streamlining processes which allow our people to focus on their core job requirement rather than admin. I’m also seeing more innovation in the sustainability space – ways of reducing our footprint either through sustainable products or sustainable operations – reducing waste at all levels. COVID has also had a huge impact on the focus of many businesses particularly around supply chain risk management – needing to ensure supply in challenging times.