The Procurement Centre of Excellence

Make your procurement a strategic asset

In today’s challenging conditions, organisations of all types, sizes and sectors are reassessing their operations and searching for ways to reduce costs and deliver improved value and results.

The Procurement function offers genuine scope to achieve these goals; but major, long-term gains will only come if you work to get more from the entire Procurement cycle.

Delivering Procurement Excellence

The team of experts in our Procurement Centre of Excellence (PCE) offer an extensive range of service packages, to help you create the desired procurement platform for your business. These can cover the complete range of procurement practices and procedures or be tailored to help you to achieve specific objectives – for example, “foundation gains” or “sustainable progression”.

Our priority is to unlock genuine, new added value. So, for each stage, we can also help you produce either a wide-ranging business case or an incremental set of ROIs to ensure the value justifies the effort involved.

Want to know more?

The Procurement Centre of Excellence is a prime example of the new wider range of solutions that we can now offer to meet your needs – both today and as your organisation continues to evolve.

Click on the links below for more information.

  • Look beyond “purchasing”

    Streamlining purchase-to-pay processes is firmly in the spotlight, as an untapped source of major cost savings. This can certainly offer valuable short-term returns but there’s much more to procurement than just the buying of goods and services. When recognised and supported as a strategic function, procurement can not only improve profit margin but also support business change and provide a powerful competitive edge.

    Our experts are ready and eager to work with you, to deliver this end-to-end approach to procurement that will make it a real, sustainable strategic asset to your organisation:

    • driving down costs without sacrificing quality – through better processes, procedures and supplier selection/management

    • supporting strategy execution by improving control over contracts, spending or suppliers

    • creating – or realising the full potential of an effective procurement function.

  • The Procurement Centre of Excellence

    The PCE draws upon a full range of resources, skills and experience from across our Group. It gives you the services, solutions and assistance you need, to achieve best-practice procurement:

    either

    • • Strategically – applying an holistic approach, to get all the necessary elements in place, working together effectively and delivering clear, recognisable, strategic value to the organisation.

    or

    • Tactically – taking a phased approach, to focus on the specific aspects of your operation that will benefit the most from urgent action.

  • Service packages

    The Procurement Centre of Excellence can offer a wide range of services, including:

    • 360° Assessment

    • Procurement dashboard

    • Preferred supplier list

    • Sourcing exercise

    • Spend analysis

    • Category tender

    • Contract management

    • End-to-end procurement

    • CIPS certification

    • Procurement workshop

    • e-Procurement and e-Invoicing

    Together these cover the complete range of procurement practices and procedures, but they can also be completely tailored to suit your organisation’s level of procurement resources or grouped together to help you to achieve specific objectives – for example, “foundation gains” or “sustainable progression”.

  • Example project - 360° assessment

    One client asked us to assess its procurement function, to identify its strengths and weaknesses. After working through our 360° diagnostic questionnaire with the client, we were able to show them the areas of their procurement function that needed support. Our team were then able to work with the client to determine the priorities and set to work on them.

  • Example project - improved purchasing

    A dispersed purchasing function – with many buyers located in the business areas, rather than a dedicated procurement or purchasing team – was a cause for concern for another of our clients. We were asked to look at the current issues and design a robust purchasing function. Our resulting recommendation was not a complete re-write of their processes but various small changes to the way the company handled purchase orders, together with the implementation of strategic supplier management.

  • Example project - software consultancy

    We have also worked with clients that have installed our Agresso or CODA procurement and purchasing software solutions. As a result, the clients gained a better understanding of the links between the procurement function and the accounts function. It has also improved the process-design stage of the software implementation, ensuring sustainable progression.

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