To realise its collective procurement power, the Omnia Group recently introduced SEARCHLIGHT Description Based Spend Analysis software, a product distributed by CCI-Growthcon. The implementation of the software follows after Omnia had identified an opportunity to get better deals from suppliers in terms of service and price by setting up Group contracts for certain commodities.
Omnia CPO and project champion Paul van Niekerk told Smart Procurement that prior to implementation key factors had to be taken into account. “First we needed a single view of exactly what it was that we were buying as a Group. Without that we were not going to achieve the benefits of a centralised Group procurement initiative.”
“The challenge was figuring out which commodities we should tackle and exactly what each of the different businesses were buying in each of these commodity groups. Like many multi-divisional organisations, Omnia currently has different ERP systems for each business. This makes meaningful Group spend analysis near-impossible without specialised analytical tools. Although our goal is to implement a single integrated ERP system with excellent procurement functionality and solid master data, we wanted to get immediate benefits from our increased Group buying power.”
He says that Omnia has been using the SEARCHLIGHT Spend Analysis software since the end of March 2007.
To us: “The main benefits that the SEARCHLIGHT software offers can be summarised as follows:
1. The software provides a single view of all transactions from all divisions including coded and free-text transactions. To spread the net even wider, accounts payable information is also added for transactions that generally do not need to go through the formal purchasing system.
2. The free-text analysis tools within SEARCHLIGHT allow users to group similar transactions and identify savings opportunities in categories that were previously near impossible to analyse.
3. The SEARCHLIGHT Description Based analysis tools also help to track contract compliance. This is particularly important after a client company has set up a new Group contract based on a savings opportunity and want to make sure the contract is used, and the benefits are realised.”
