10 July 2022
Topics in this article
  • Property & FM
  • Transformation

As one of the world’s leading property services businesses, this organization has assets all over the globe and procurement teams in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.

Challenge

A new Chief Procurement Officer with global accountability joined the organization. Their initial assessment concluded that the procurement experience was highly variable by region. Each geography was semi-autonomous, with local application of global policy and significant freedom to operate. Furthermore, the majority of the operation appeared to be reactive and sourcing-focused.

The CPO set out a vision for Procurement to lead the commercial and supplier management agenda for the business. This would involve becoming “one function,” embedding category management (to start), and building more collaborative relationships with business stakeholders. Proxima was asked to support the transformation.

Approach

We deployed a team of experienced consultants who had previously led Procurement functions and/or complex procurement transformation initiatives. We quickly identified that the organization was “data light” and decisions were likely best received in incremental steps. We designed a three-phased approach, the first of which was a Functional Assessment.

The Assessment worked with global Procurement to identify what Procurement “should be”; articulating the design principles of a function based on business, stakeholder, and customer needs. Proxima assessed the current organization, identifying strengths, regional differences, and capability gaps against the design principles.

Where necessary, we brought in stakeholder insights and external ideas to bring pragmatic challenges to the procurement vision.

Results

The assessment ran for an initial ten weeks and was conducted through a series of data reviews, interviews, workshops, and design labs. It quickly became apparent that data was highly fragmented, and the function was more distant from stakeholders than previously thought.

However, Proxima was able to tweak the approach and outcome in conjunction with the CPO as a workaround. We delivered:

  • Identification of business goals and strategic imperatives for Procurement, embedded into the Transformation Design Principles
  • Gap analysis and observations on the pre-existing procurement model using a well-tested diagnostic and capability assessment model
  • Hypothesis Target Operating Model (TOM) recommendation, including an outline of key processes and artifacts to design/build
  • Summary of in-house capability and identified training needs when mapping current capability against hypothesis TOM
  • Plan and resource model to progress through design and into implementation.

The CPO used the assessment to build the internal case for change and progressed to designing and transforming the new operating model.

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