Purchasing services

Optimise purchases and reduce volumes

In addition to the purchase of direct production materials, a significant purchase volume goes on indirect materials. In many cases, the consumer conducts these purchasing activities themselves (Maverick Buying). This, however, gives companies huge potential for optimisation.

Indirect purchasing volumes include, e.g. services, material costs, merchandise and capital goods. Analysing the amount of these in not easy, as there are few concrete purchase orders available. Metroplan is able to perform a systematic and largely automated evaluation of these volumes. Appropriate IT systems are supported in detecting weak areas and finding optimisation potential.

Metroplan-Approach and methodology

The following phase model has been proven effective for comprehensive optimisation:

Purchasing audit and analysis phase

  • Questionnaire with around 100 questions on ‘purchasing of services’
  • The following processes are systematically checked: Facility management procurement (including maintenance and energy supply), staffing services/part-time work, company cars/ travel management, IT hard and software/ telecommunications, transport/ storage/ warehousing, marketing/ print/ media services, investments and consumables
  • Access to ERP master and transaction data using (SAP certified) interfaces and analysis of purchase controlling using purchase-specific analysis software
  • Common understanding of weaknesses identified

Optimisation and implementation

  • Deriving of best practices (from other companies and fields)
  • Potential workshops per product group to find concrete methods for optimisation and to improve procurement processes
  • Optimise deployed IT systems
  • Implementation of pilot projects with a savings potential of > 30 % (e.g. by lowering the cost of telecommunications); goal: show the feasibility in the short-term

Reporting und Roll-out

  • Transfer the optimisation potential to other commodity groups
  • Implement a reporting system with monthly reports; these reports visibly show changes in terms of reaching targets  
  • Ongoing analyses (e.g. demand pooling and calls for tender in individual commodity groups or monthly reports for purchase control) as a managed shared service for Metroplan clients
  • Transfer the purchasing process to other procurement areas to successively optimise services for the entire division

Customer benefits

  • Better terms for purchasing services
  • More efficient order processing using a suitable IT system
  • Clearly show responsibility for the purchasing and procurement of services
  • Define roles and responsibilities (such as process owner, data steward, commodity manager, key user)
  • Coordinate purchasing strategies for the purchase of all services