How Aegon Life transformed its sourcing function with Krinati Solutions
Aegon Life Insurance Company is a leading life insurer in India — the first to offer online term plans, with a relentless digital-first focus. Internally, though, its sourcing process was completely manual, and it screamed for attention.
- Sourcing team size
- 2
- Industry
- Insurance
- Location
- Mumbai, India
The challenge
A lean team managing a manual process presented a set of obvious challenges. The sourcing process was distributed between users and the purchase team: supplier selection was managed by the users, price negotiation by purchase. The need for more compliance, better collaboration and faster cycle times was strongly felt.
eSourcing had never been tried before, and there was apprehension about supplier participation. Whatever solution was implemented could not burden the lean team further.
The solution
After surveying the market, Aegon entered into an agreement with Krinati Solutions in January 2020. The primary goal was governance and audit compliance — management knew that with best-practice processes in place, savings would be a natural outcome.
Auctions were conducted for all types of spend, and the ROI was realized in the very first month. Soon the internal mandate became: “why should an item or service not be auctioned?” When Covid lockdowns hit, online sourcing events were far easier to manage. The internal team was hands-on with the solution — independently creating and publishing events and onboarding suppliers. The benefits were communicated to every function — HR, IT, Admin — and adoption became organization-wide.
“With our investment in Krinati, we not only realized significant bottom-line savings, but also drove best practice processes in our sourcing function.”
The outcome
The solution proved extremely simple for suppliers, making onboarding easy. Clear communication — internally to stakeholders and externally to suppliers — kept objectives clear and addressed concerns proactively.
RFPs for all spend are now routed through Krinati Sourcing, with online auctions conducted wherever applicable. This drove governance across the entire sourcing process — a key program objective — while 10–25% savings across categories created a positive bottom-line impact.
“The solution is extremely easy to use for suppliers as well and we get no resistance from them. The online auctions were positioned as beneficial for suppliers since it made the process totally transparent for them. We ensured that online bids were honored and awarded with no further negotiations.”