eProcurement Rollout

The client.

A FORTUNE© 500 financial services company.

The business issue.

This company's procurement processes were decentralized and inconsistent:

• Financial approvals were not obtained prior to purchase, leading to long, manual approval processes after receipt of invoices.
• Reviews of historical transactions identified up to 20 percent variance between contracted and billed rates.
• The company's current eProcurement platform was not up to date and required a significant amount of work outside of the system.

The company selected the Ariba Enterprise Spend Management suite to serve as its procure-to-pay (P2P) technology. It would implement several key modules, including Buyer, Contracts Workbench, Sourcing, Category Manager, Category Procurement and Invoicing.

The solution.

Claro Group professionals worked with the company's procurement, financial and IT resources to:

• Develop an implementation plan and timeline.
• Leverage P2P best practices.
• Capture and document the business and technical requirements.
• Configure the application to company specifications.
• Develop and implement training for the key stakeholders.
• Design and conduct supplier onboarding.
• Support the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) process.
• Deploy the application.

Team members also performed a review of the company's historical spend and contract compliance to identify target commodities for the initial launch. Based on this review, the company:

• Targeted $120 million in annual spend and approximately 75 suppliers for the first wave of implementation.
• Utilized a commodity approach to onboarding to minimize potential end-user confusion.
• Leveraged traditional catalog procurement, as well as category procurement functionality.

The company then worked with Claro Group professionals to execute the second phase of the rollout, which focused on:

• Retiring its existing eProcurement system (including onboarding the 300+ suppliers currently on the system).
• Implementing ghost cards for payment.
• Investigating a non-PO invoice model to standardize the financial approval process.
• Identifying additional spend to migrate to the platform.

The results.

This approach enabled the company to increase regulatory compliance and enforce financial approvals up front. As a result, it increased spend visibility and improved contract rate compliance, resulting in savings of $4 - $6 million during the first wave of implementation.