Faster, streamlined procurement operations for a multinational beverage company

The company issues more than 100,000 POs every year across the regions it operates in, covering over $6 billion of its indirect spend. But a company of this size can face issues when standardizing how operating units implement purchasing rules. In this case, operating unit teams were applying process controls inconsistent with corporate policy, which, over time, hindered procurement cycle times and employee experience and caused inefficiencies. For instance, territories followed local rules for purchasing, which added scores of unnecessary compliance checks to the company's standard purchasing rules and dragged out the purchase order approval process.

The company wanted better visibility and control over the way different territories ran their purchasing cycles. User experience was another priority. The different systems used by each territory were highly manual, prone to error, and relied on multiple touchpoints between people and teams to complete routine tasks.

When Genpact started working with the company, our joint goal was to automate purchasing operations as quickly as possible. This would deliver the efficiency and user experience the company desired. But we first needed to rationalize and standardize processes.

We took a country-by-country approach to simplify the purchasing process. We revisited all the purchasing policies followed at each operating unit and aligned them to the corporate purchasing policy. We then defined business rules and implemented them across all operating units, cutting 25 procurement checks/rules down to just five. We also worked on eliminating the duplicate validation checks done at PR-PO processing level. This was followed up with mandating a zero-check policy on purchases under $5,000, which made up about 40% of transactions. The result? We achieved a 40% reduction in the team's workload and rationalized and standardized purchasing policies across the globe.

This paved the way to bring in automation to make the purchasing process even smoother. The company was already using Salesforce for its purchasing operations but not to its full potential. We collaborated to enhance the use of the software and built a single intake tool to handle all global PRs that needed to be transformed into POs. Now, once a user makes a request, the PR gets automatically flipped into a PO and dispatched to the customer.

Lastly, we connected Salesforce to Microsoft Power Business Insights (Power BI) to crunch the data from Celonis and SAP to deliver end-to-end performance metrics for each operating unit.

Our country-by-country approach to standardization means processes are identical in all markets and the company has more visibility and control over purchasing operations across its territories.

Together, we achieved a fully automated and touchless PR to PO process, with the cycle time slashed by two-thirds. Plus, the company now has access to data that will help to further increase purchasing performance in all operating units.

A more predictable, error-free, and quicker cycle time means greater purchasing efficiency and happier employees. And the company now has control over and insight into the whole process and can identify opportunities for improvement.