Successfully utilise challenges & opportunities in procurement
Procurement organisations of all sectors and company sizes are facing major challenges today: They have to intervene acutely in the areas of price defence, bottleneck management and cost reduction, but at the same time use the opportunity to place itself in the areas of make-or-buy, sustainability and data management. Therefore, strategic procurement is becoming more relevant.
At the same time, these changes offer opportunities to position procurement as the key value driver in the company. Here we support our clients in projects at eye level, in which we satisfy acute needs as a team, address strategic topics and develop the procurement organisation as a whole.
Interim & Executive Search
Executive Search consultants find the best experts with the right mindset for you to optimally complement and strengthen your procurement team. You can find more information here.
Do you need support to master the challenges in your procurement organisation and position it optimally for the future? Below you will find an overview of our services with which we can support you directly or preventively.
Information on sales and other special topics are just a click away. You can also find more exciting topics in the blog or in our book “System of Negotiations”.
Our expertise
Direct optimisation
Bilateral negotiations
The current market environment is not broad enough to rely on market prices for negotiation results. Therefore, typical procurement negotiations take place bilaterally – for example, negotiations against the big software houses. The bilateral procurement negotiation of the future is systematic, data-based and delivers replicable results. In three phases, we create courses of action, an end-2-end negotiation plan and maximise the outcome by making the best use of the created negotiating power.
Competitive Negotiation
It is becoming increasingly rare for suppliers to be 100% comparable and in direct competition. Therefore, it becomes the crucial task of the negotiator to accompany the entire source-to-contract process (S2C process) and to create competition by creating comparability. On the basis of the created competition, it is necessary to optimise the results down to the decimal place. By getting commitment and designing an incentive-optimised negotiation process, we ensure that the effect of competition and thus the success of your price negotiation in procurement is maximised.
Bottleneck Task Force
Supply bottlenecks can destroy the profits of the entire business year in a very short time or lead directly to a substantial corporate crisis. With our specialised, effective task force, we establish cross-company interfaces and create solutions to meet acute challenges as quickly as possible and establish an early warning system for future risks.
Cost reduction initiatives
Cost reduction must not be implemented on a case-by-case basis, but always across the entire procurement portfolio. Through a holistic approach and with the help of modern tools and methods from data science, mathematical optimisation and machine learning, we identify potentials, opportunities and risks and implement them in the best possible way.
You can find out more about us and our methodology here.
Strategic
Initiatives
In an increasingly turbulent market environment, procurement has the opportunity to act as an objective comparator and mediator, combining quantitative and qualitative aspects, mediating between company divisions and creating transparency. A Make-or-Buy-Analysis can evaluate options for action holistically and therefore opportunities and risks can be better weighed.
In some industries, the trend is extreme: CO2 savings are becoming just as important for procurement as monetary savings – entire business models are being put to the test. Here, too, strategic procurement has the opportunity to position itself as the key value driver. By creating transparency, tracking CO2 savings and setting up internal and external incentive mechanisms, it sets the ground for compliance with sustainability goals.
Conventional methods are not sufficient to deliver solutions to the problems of procurement with today’s complexities and data volumes. Most organisations respond by artificially simplifying the issues – solving a 2D representation of a 3D problem. Data Science allows us to solve the actual 3D problem in all its complexity. In this way, we identify potentials, evaluate possible risk and price developments and find the optimal solutions for highly complex distribution problems.
Our NAG 100+ toolbox covers the entire S2C process and helps our customers to react quickly and flexibly to new challenges without losing efficiency.
Organisational development
The future of procurement no longer lies in pure purchasing, but more and more in the management of value-creating partnerships. Together, we establish mindset, processes and expertise across all strategic, tactical and operational levels.
We start with a maturity analysis and assess the effectiveness of your organisation in terms of strategic procurement and negotiation management. We then work with your team to develop the optimal organisational structure for procurement and negotiation management of the future.
We combine procurement experience with expertise in negotiation management. This allows us to focus on the central aspect of value creation – the negotiation – and to optimise the processes according to this goal.
As a dedicated team of experts for strategic sourcing and negotiation management, the CoC acts as an innovator and driver for negotiation excellence. It acts as an interface between business units and establishes the right negotiation mindset in your organisation. In this way, the CoC creates direct influence on EBIT, efficiency in awarding processes and holistic optimisation of negotiation results across the entire company.
Successful negotiation does not work if the initiative is short-term or focused only on individual areas. Instead, it requires continuous, broad improvement through enablement, proactive knowledge management and a clear focus on the right negotiation mindset. The corresponding Learning Journey is individually adapted to your company and the different requirement profiles of your employees in order to systematically improve the maturity level of your organisation over a period of two to four years.
Learn more about our Academy.