FAQ

General

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Procurement

Simply put, a “Procurement Strategy” is the approach any given organization uses to acquire goods and services to run its business.  This ranges from tactical approaches via ad hoc buys performed by departmental resources, to fully built-out complex Procurement solutions leveraging third-party expertise, capabilities, and elastic capacity.

 

The manner every company chooses to source, procure, and consume goods/services is key to creating a market advantage for themselves.  Firms consuming world-class Procurement strategies are able to use it as a differentiator to support COGS reductions, gain speed to market, and create efficiencies in every dollar spent.

 

More accurately, the question is, how does the modern organization consume a variety of commodities from different global sources in the most efficient manner possible?  Due to the very nature of organizations being dynamic in order to maintain and reinforce their product/service advantages in the marketplace, so is their need for commodities constantly being revised over time.  As the goods and services market moves to support organizational spend requirements and demand, a well-thought out Procurement strategy is a critical part of market differentiation and first-mover advantage.

 

The most nimble organizations leverage a Procurement strategy which consumes third-party Procurement expertise, as an adjunct to their own in-house team to leverage specific points of subject matter expertise, market experience, industry relationships, or even internal team commodity skillset gaps.  While not limited to supporting an in-house team, the last decade has seen broad market acceptance of ‘Procurement as a Service’, in lieu of expensive, fixed-cost and fixed-capacity in-house Procurement resources.  InFor500’s elastic support capabilities add capacity to address a broad variety of corporate spend – from the most complex purchases, down to more straightforward ‘spot buys’

 

One of the most familiar items any consulting team hears from internal client resources is, “I’ve been doing this for years with my supplier and I know the space better than you do.”  It is important to remember, third-party firms are not in the business of knowing more than the client about why or how a particular good and/or service is consumed by and for the client’s company.  To that degree, InFor500’s model is to partner with various client internal resources to digest and understand key features/functionalities of the given good and/or service.  Applying world-class Procurement strategies and concentrating on securing market leverage during a particular negotiation is where InFor500 keeps our focus.

 

As companies move towards leveraging Procurement solutions, they come to realize spending time and internal resources away from their core mission and products, can become a liability to the company.  Using their top level talent focused on their core mission is key.  This frees up internal resources to put time and effort where it is best utilized.  These activities are ‘core’ and additive to the client’s solutions.  Items falling outside of these core activities are where InFor500 adds the most value – returning money into the customer’s pocket on every engagement via focusing on client’s ‘non-core’ components and gaining the most efficiencies to provide the client a competitive advantage.

Core focus may also be where a client places their leadership team.  The most sophisticated ‘Procurement-as-a-Service’ adopters understand their management keeps focus on corporate direction and the creation/measurement of output goals.  The question of ‘how’ these goals are met is ‘contextual’ to the client – but ‘core’ to InFor500.

  • Expertise – Companies that outsource their procurement function can tap into a larger pool of experts and improve their internal efficiency and overall operations performance.
  • Savings – Measurable cost savings delivered by leveraging InFor500’s expertise and supplier relationship.
  • Compliance to Process – Expertise to eliminate operational risk by adhering to institutionalized procurement processes, policies and compliance requirements.
  • Focus on context work – InFor500 provides focus to areas that are quite often unsupported or under-supported by the client’s Procurement department, since developing in-house expertise and keeping them current can be challenging and costly.

 

Numerous InFor500 clients have an in-house Procurement team when engaging our organization.  While InFor500 does provide full team outsourced Procurement organizations and complete solutions, we also work as an add-on in support of the client’s existing in-house team.  In many cases, clients elect to focus InFor500 on large and/or challenging spend areas where an in-house Procurement team would require a higher level of expertise or industry experience/relationships to significantly move the needle.

In-house Procurement organizations always have the business processes and expertise specific to their own company.  InFor500 augments in-house Procurement teams with market intelligence and current, highly relevant commodity expertise for various functional business units.  The combination of in-house with augmented InFor500 services creates a critically necessary synergy to streamline Strategic Sourcing efforts and reduce bottom line costs.  As stated above, this empowers in-house Procurement and consuming departments to maintain their focus on ‘core’ issues.

InFor500 provides its customers with Procurement services delivering subject matter expertise needed across the following categories: Demand, Sourcing, Contract, Risk, and Performance Management.  These service towers are delivered via deeply experienced industry experts across a broad commodity background.  Our ability to bring process maturity, emphasize transparency and inclusion, and engage all stakeholders in a manner fostering an understanding of how services can improve while controlling costs and securing the enterprise is one of InFor500’s key differentiating factors.

InFor500’s key value differentiators are:

  • Industry Reach & Relationships
  • Deep Subject Matter Expertise & Specialization in Sourcing
    • Industry Expertise – Retail, Finance, Telecom, Mobile, Social, Government, Healthcare, Semiconductor, Network, Storage, Life Sciences, and E-commerce
  • Procurement Service Delivery process maturity
  • Nearshore and Offshore delivery centers – Ability to provide around-the-clock transactional services.

InFor500 helps customers with procurement outsourcing – including Sourcing, Category Management, Transaction Management, or a combination of these components. Specifically this falls under three categories of services.

  • Front end Services – Create a nimble and scalable procurement strategy that enables businesses to focus on their core business while most of the context work is outsourced. Lead strategic sourcing projects through InFor500’s specialized commodity subject matter expertise
  • Mid-Tier Services – Provide end-to-end procurement services, delivering savings and cost avoidance in the range of 18%-22%.

Indirect Spend – IT (Apps, Infra, Services, etc.), Facilities, Marketing, Engineering, Legal, Finance, Travel and HR

Direct Spend – Mfg Services, 3PL/4PL Optimization, Inventory Optimization, Cost Optimization, and Consumables

  • Backoffice Transactional Services
    • Business process fulfillment – 24 hours Turn Around Time (TAT) SLA-based service fulfillment for Procure to Pay, inclusive of Purchase Request to Purchase Order (PR2PO) generation, two-way matching of goods receipt, and Accounts Payable.
    • Procurement Analytics – Spend and Demand analytics across business units, regions, and commodity type.

InFor500 Procurement Practices are straightforward and easier to institutionalize in companies that do not already have a structured Procurement practice.  We deliver the tools, process and talent necessary for a lean Procurement organization that can scale with the company.

Yes. Most of InFor500 engagements start small as a proof of concept, and over time scale to the client’s needs.

Technology and Process Optimization

Quantifying the pain point in a current business process fulfillment and then finding the right technology to transform the process to a predicable business outcome.

 

InFor500 can help with the process in the Information Technology, Engineering, Procurement, Manufacturing, Finance, Facilities, Supply Chain, Human Resources, Marketing, Compliance and Sales.

 

InFor500 has practitioners who have the process subject matter expertise across Semiconductor, Retail, Capital Equipment, Life Sciences, software, hardware, computer, medical, etc.

 

InFor500 has the necessary subject matter expertise with the large to small scale enterprise technology software’s inclusive of SAP, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, to name some.

 

InFor500 can help analyze your current business fulfillment methodology and establish business processes across all functionals areas addressing the necessary business outcome. We will recommend industry best practices, references, technology and automation tools to develop the best optimal business processes.

 

InFor500 can help with any business transformation (or) technology selection assessment, we can analyze your current business pain points and map it across various technologies and select the one the delivers your best business outcome. With our procurement practice we can give provide a rough order of magnitude with high confidence to help procure the technology and services.

 

Mergers & Acquisitions

InFor500 can augment your inhouse team focused on the due diligence for integration/merger/divesture/separation project by providing access to our M&A partners, negotiating legal\M&A fees, developing Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) costs and timeline.

 

InFor500 can provide sizing the pre-integration efforts for costs and timeline. We can help your due diligence to analyze and quantify the impact to services and contracts across all functional areas.

 

InFor500 can help with novation related activities for a divesture, segregation of assets and help establish contracts between the two entities. Also, we can help source and procure technology/services and infrastructure for all aspects of your business needs to meet your milestones as part of the overall project time-line. InFor500 process framework inclusive of methodology, templates and talent can help accelerate the entire Integration (or) divesture timeline.

 

InFor500 can help with right-sizing you external spend post M&A (or) divesture in-line with the new business goals. Where it is related to Termination Services Agreement (TSA) or procuring new commodities, InFor500 has the process framework inclusive of methodology, templates and talent that can help accelerate the business outcome.