10 November 2021
Topics in this article
  • Travel & Hospitality

This is one of the world’s largest hospitality companies, with over 5000 hotels around the world. They have a global Procurement operation with a notable presence in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Challenge

The CPO led an established Procurement function, delivering sourcing and category management and enabling services for central functions and hotel owners around the world. The category teams consisted of numerous experts alongside newer employees learning their category and their craft.

Having delivered several waves of value, procurement needed to work faster and do more complex and innovative things to maintain momentum and continue to delight customers. The teams were looking for ways to drive efficiencies, upskill, and increase organizational knowledge of markets and suppliers.

Approach

Together with the CPO, Proxima tailored and delivered a training curriculum to launch a technical skills program in key markets. We then built a Procurement Intelligence service to empower the teams with research and data about key suppliers, categories, and markets.

In creating the “Insights +” and “Analytics +” services, Proxima designed a client-tailored and branded Service Catalog, comprising research and data products that would be useful to the category teams on a proactive and ad hoc basis. We then created training and a rollout plan to support users and bring the service live around the world.

Proxima specialists, working in our Procurement Operations Center, delivered the service, leveraging numerous data sources, tools, and Proxima knowledge and skills.

Having completed initial training and operating manuals, the first users went live with the service. We worked closely with a client Demand Manager to “sell” the service and schedule support with the category teams. Small service adjustments were made where needed and the rollout plan then continued across other user groups.

We created a prioritization model whereby the Demand Manager could work with Proxima to accelerate high-importance requests or change the balance between proactive and reactive requests when appropriate.

Over the initial months of service delivery, we proactively monitored quality, usefulness, and service levels so that in the first quarter governance meeting we could recalibrate around client needs and set challenging target SLAs, but that also fit with client processes, culture, and behaviors.

Results

Over the first year of service, our team and procurement intelligence service delivered an average of ten high-quality reports per month plus additional data services. Stakeholder feedback for the same period averaged 9 out of 10. Our client received:

  • Flexible access to specialist capability and tools
  • A pipeline of proactive insights and an on-demand intelligence service
  • The ability to accelerate knowledge acquisition for category teams
  • The ability to go faster and have more informed conversations

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