Hollard Group Procurement Manager, Arie De Ridder, outlines how the insurer made use of leading technologies to assist them with consolidating and managing their expenditure, in this month’s SmartProcurement.
Background
De Ridder told SmartProcurement that Hollard procurement was faced with a number of issues for which they needed an urgent solution, these included:
- access to management information was problematic;
- reports were being issued in a static format; and
- requests for new information/ad hoc reports would generally take weeks, if not months, to generate.
“This made it difficult for the department to make timely strategic decisions, and restricted their interrogation of anomalies in their data, and in the reports they received” he said.
In order to address the situation, we set out to find a solution that addressed the following objectives:
- Consolidation of information – transactional data, supplier categorisation, BEE information, contract data.
- Help set up monthly report packs around the specific requirements the department had
- Provide Hollard with a front end solution – that would assist the department in interrogating information on-the-fly and creating their own reports as and when needed
- Help the department get greater buy in to key business objectives by highlighting the cost of non compliance and ‘gaps’ in each divisions data, in a highly visual format
After careful analysis Hollard chose to use Purchasing Index’s analysis and modelling service called SpendTrak.
Reason
Hollard decided that that PI’s solution provided for instant access to all of Hollard’s spend data, which would help increase visibility, and speed up the rate at which strategic decisions could be made.
Hollard needed a solution that could be rapidly deployed, assist them with putting together information hosted in disparate systems and databases, and provide them with tools to assist with ongoing data analysis.
Situation
Hollard requested PI to provide a complete end-to-end solution – taking all the transactional information Hollard had (contract, BEE and supplier categorisation data), integrating this information, and providing them with a consolidated view of their spend.
‘We then requested PI to assist uswith putting together report packs, and provide Hollard with a front end solution that would allow the department to access all spend data to create the reports we needed and analyse information on the fly.’ said De Ridder.
Benefits & Results
Hollard has realised the following key benefits through using PI’s analysis and modelling service:
- Increase the speed at which strategic decisions are made
- Assistance in identifying ‘gaps’ and inaccuracies in the data – in terms of the supplier categorisation, etc.
- Hot-line service – that could be used to speak to a PI analyst and assist with creating new reports, making changes to existing reports, etc.
- The department was able to show the business where the opportunities were to reduce costs, increase efficiencies, etc, quickly and in a format that could be easily interpreted and understood.
Outcomes
- Hollard now has an easy to use solution, which allows them to set up reports and analyse data ‘on-the-fly’, and which gives the organisation the ability to drill down on large volumes of data to as granular a level as is required.
- Increased visibility on spend
- An increase in productivity through a reduction in lead times to generate reports and access vital spend data.
- Procurement is now able to quickly, and visually, highlight the value the department is adding to the bottom line.
“Spendtrak has given us the ability to drill down and draw vital management information at the click of a button that would have normally taken months to extract.”
For more information on SpendTrak contact Alan Low on 084 890 0005 or via email, alan@pricetrak.co.za.
