A lean team managing a manual process – this presented a set of obvious challenges. One, the sourcing process was distributed between the users and the purchase team. Supplier selection was managed by the users and the price negotiation by the purchase team. The need for more compliance, better collaboration and faster cycle times was felt.
eSourcing was never tried before and there was apprehension about supplier participation in the process. Additionally, any solution, if implemented, shouldn’t burden the team further.
After surveying the market for the right solution, Aegon entered into an agreement with Krinati Solutions in Jan 2020.
The primary goal was governance and audit-compliance. The management knew that if best-practice processes were adopted, savings would be a natural outcome.
Auctions were conducted for all types of spend and the ROI was realised in the very first month itself. Very soon, the mandate internally was “why should an item or service not be auctioned?”
When Covid hit and lockdowns were imposed, the online sourcing events were much easier to manage. Since the internal team was hands-on with the solution, they could independently create & publish events and onboard suppliers as well.
The benefits of using Krinati was communicated to all functions – HR, IT, Admin – and the adoption was organization-wide.
