Is the budget process granular enough to meet the way management wants to organize and control the business and projects? Is there a win /win across the organization or is there significant manual effort to reconstruct data to support budget consumption and reporting?

Spend Management

How is the organization cost of sales coded and structured? It is classified in a way that helps and support the organization to leverage synergies and drive effective category management? What reporting dashboards are available to identify, monitor and track spend? Is compliance checked and validated? Are insights created from spend analysis? What’s the role for Artificial Intelligence?

Functional Teamwork

Do the skills of the team meet the requirements of the organization? How is the team structured to support business growth and are they capable of scaling to meet the increasing demands? What is the supply chain value add and what drives competitive advantage? Is the team strategically focussed or transaction driven?

Strategic Sourcing

What determines the level of sourcing engagement? Is there a ‘one size fits all’ approach? Is the approach based on a proactive plan rather than a reactive transaction? What value is generated and measured from strategic sourcing efforts? How is the team trained and evaluated? When is good, good enough?

Has the organization identified ESG targets? How will this impact the organizational supply chain? Do you have a Code of Conduct? What approach is required to support Scope 3 supplier data capture? Are there any diversity or minority business supplier inclusion goals? Who manages the process?

Risk Management

Are risks identified, reviewed, tracked and measured? Are risks recorded in a silo register or linked to an active transaction, project and/or supplier record. Is the due diligence scope comprehensive to include a balanced view (for example, financial, technical, social, political, environmental, operational, cyber security, data processing factors)? What level of automation and independent third party checks are applied to verify risks throughout the lifecycle? Who oversees and governs risk organizationally?

Contract Management

Does a central contract repository exist? How are contracts created and managed? Who is accountable for the contract within the organization? Are contracts integral to the business process and how automated is the process? Are contracts static or dynamic and what part do they play in helping drive ongoing performance improvement? Can framework arrangements help accelerate business operations?

Supplier Relationship Management

Are supplier relationships valued by the organization? How are suppliers identified, registered and vetted? Who is accountable for the supplier record and what controls exist to manage the supplier base? Does the organization rank and tier the suppliers or are they treated all equally? Is supplier sustainability and diversity important to the business? How are strategic partners managed to enable value to be created?

When is demand or forecasting information shared with the supply chain? Is demand shared at an appropriate level? What opportunities exist to shorten lead-time and development cycles? Do system tools exist to help and automate the sharing process? Who is accountable for managing and prioritizing the demand within the organization? How far down into the supply chain should demand be shared?

Order Management

Who places orders and is the process streamlined? Is there an opportunity to automate the process and leverage digital technology to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the process? How is the order transaction valued?

Training & Development

New technology requires new skills to be developed. What assessment has been conducted to understand the gap? Is input and output quality considered important? Training is required both internally and externally – suppliers are impacted as much as the internal teams. Do you have a dedicated helpdesk or is it shared with IT? Is there a playbook and plan, or is it assumed that it will just happen? Are skill enhancements and/or new resources required (CIPS, CSA etc)?

Reporting

Does reporting require heavy manual intervention? How is data valued? Is there a reporting strategy? Are reports connected across operational, management and executive levels in a way that supports different top down and bottom up perspectives on the same dataset? Do measures reflect the value steps across the end-to-end process? What KPI’s make sense ?

Are payments made late? What level of integration and automation exists to help remove potential bottlenecks? How is the business supported by Finance to accelerate the process? Is there a mindset that payment transactions have little value to the organization but an army exists to support these processes? Does the backend become responsible for the frontend issue? What is the paradigm shift?

NEED SOLUTIONS TO THESE CHALLENGES?