Siemens Listens to "Voice of Customer" to Devise
e-Procurement Strategy
Siemens, with over 430,000 employees worldwide, has grown to be a global icon by listening closely to the "voice of the customer", and the Siemen’s solution to effective eProcurement was no different!
In North America, Siemens had been up and running with an SAP SRM e-Procurement platform for over two years, but Global Shared Services’ procurement customers were expressing dissatisfaction with the content available in the system, and the overall user experience.
Siemens selected the Vinimaya SmartSearch Catalog solution to accomplish the goals of driving user adoption to improve compliance. Drake Paben, TITLE at Siemens, describes Vinimaya as "one of the easiest implementations I've ever been involved with - three months from start to full production roll-out," Paben further states that the difference in the "before" and "after" picture could not be more stark in contrast.
In Siemens' view, the Vinimaya solution has been a Win/Win/Win for Users, Procurement, and Suppliers alike:
Users Win
Single user interface, accessible in local language, to simultaneously search
and compare products, pricing, and availability from multiple vendors.
Procurement Wins
Improved user adoption, and real-time price verification to preemptively
isolate price discrepancies before they create re-work in Accounts Payable on
the back end, or as Paben says, "before little mistakes become costly
mistakes."
Non-invasive, low-cost connectivity to their web catalog content that leverages their existing investments and eliminates the need to re-format and diminish the quality of their unique content, by populating Excel files or other data extracts for loading into local catalogs.
"Our goal was to ensure that if you can shop online at home, you can shop online at Siemens. The Vinimaya solution was one of the easiest implementations I’ve ever been involved with.”
Drake Paben
Hearing the voice of the customer loud and clear, Siemens has implemented a best practice content strategy resulting in:
- Increased usability and user adoption; reduced maverick spend
- Maximized used of supplier web catalog content (80% of all catalogs - 20% local are small suppliers with no web presence)
- Drastic reductions in PO/Invoice price discrepancies
- Globally scalable solution with fixed, predictable costs even as user/catalog volumes grow
- More time to focus on strategic activities due to minimal internal support needed (~ 1 FTE to manage global solution)
