By Emily Allender / 11 Jun 2019 / Topics: Procurement
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Enterprise
Challenge:
The client experienced slow and inefficient processes across its global corporate supply chain.
Solution:
A customized e-procurement platform and global program to support the company’s in-country needs, including language, currency, leasing and warehousing
Results:
- Made 80% of product quotes and orders self-service
- Reduced supply chain complexity
- Consolidated several vendors into one
- Better equipped to meet SLAs
Solution area:
Insight’s Supply Chain Optimization solutions simplify the process of procuring, maintaining and replacing the technology clients invest in to run their business.
An internal solution provider to more than 30 business units struggled with rampant inefficiencies in its IT procurement and deployment due to an overly complicated supply chain.
The company’s parent organization is an international conglomerate with dozens of subsidiaries in industries ranging from manufacturing to healthcare. Across its 1,300 global locations, the parent organization has more than 120,000 employees.
This subsidiary worked with multiple vendors but continued to experience long quote, ordering and delivery times — especially when it came to global operations. Its incumbent partner only shipped from the United Kingdom, resulting in frequent Service-Level Agreement (SLA) misses for its end users.
The U.K. product origination also created tax and freight issues, slowed IT asset shipments and limited future growth potential. Individual business units resorted to managing their own deployments, which led to a model far more decentralized than the one in North America.
Because of an existing relationship between Insight and other subsidiaries of the company, the client reached out to us. We proposed a customized e-procurement platform to help the client streamline its high volume of quotes and orders for Hewlett Packard Enterprise® and Cisco® equipment. The platform would display certified server and Nimble Storage® configurations in product groups to simplify the ordering process.
Despite the high volume of orders, transitioning to one, globally capable partner would help the client improve time to quote and time to delivery across the board — subsequently reducing its supply chain complexity worldwide.
Together, our team of Supply Chain Optimization experts and network of vetted alliance partners are able to support up to 98% of the client’s current in-country needs, including language, currency and in-person relationships, as well as procurement, leasing, warehousing and brick-and-mortar footprints.
As a result, the company is able to focus on scaling its business in foreign markets. Now, 80% of the client’s quotes are self-service through an online catalog — up from 60% with the previous partner. And, the remaining 20% of quotes have drastically reduced SLAs.
The solution is currently Ariba-based. However, the client would like to embrace ServiceNow on a global scale. Insight will help with the transition to this model in the future.
When it comes to the global business, the client is now able to centralize procurement and deployment to end users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific (APAC) — and is better positioned for worldwide growth.
