Empowering Procurement Excellence in a Complex Landscape

Industry:

Defense

Headquarters:

Germany

Employees:

42,000

About

The company is primarily focused on the defense and automotive sectors. Originally a manufacturer of light weapons, it has evolved into a diversified industrial conglomerate with operations in five main divisions. The company is recognized for its advanced technologies that cater to both military and civilian markets, producing items such as air defense systems, weapons, ammunition, and automotive components. With recent significant growth in its defense sector, the company’s procurement department is focused on building strong supplier relationships, adopting flexible contracting approaches, and enhancing risk management practices to ensure product efficiency and quality.

Challenges

Complex Organizational Structure and Data: Numerous mergers and acquisitions resulted in a disparate structure with 34 different ERP systems.
Digitalization and Harmonization: Create a centralized procurement process and digital experience for procurement and other users.
Flexibility and Configurability: A solution that could adapt to different processes and divisional expectations to grow with them through change.
Supplier Management and Performance: Proper capabilities to manage supplier information including compliance with supplier codes of conduct and tracking acceptance.
Visible ESG Initiatives and Metrics: Fully integrated ESG considerations into procurement processes and data transparency from one activity or workflow to the next.

Benefits

Increased Transparency and Strategic Sourcing: The transparency provided by Ivalua enables procurement teams to quickly identify and address issues, collaborate across divisions, and leverage shared information which contributes to faster reactions to market and internal changes.
Master Data Governance and Centralization: The company has onboarded hundreds of suppliers onto the Ivalua platform and created a template for interfaces for local SAP systems for contract and materials.The centralized platform allows users to access information and collaborate in real-time, significantly reducing the time required to finalize procurement activities.
Improved User Adoption and Supplier Negotiations: The teams are building regular reports to track adoption and happily have already upgraded, within a three-month project phase, to the latest version.
Users access comprehensive supplier data and insights enabling them to negotiate more effectively with customers, as well as gather information related to compliance.
Collaborative Community and Reporting: The company sees increased value and support from the Ivalua customer community. The ability to see and understand how others are pushing usage and measuring it creates benchmarks to navigate to higher utilization and upcoming upgrades.

Solutions Selected

Supplier Risk & Performance

Sourcing

Contract Management

eProcurement

Intake Management

Invoicing

Payments

Spend Analysis

The implementation of Ivalua has positioned us to achieve greater swiftness in procurement processes, reduce overall spend through enhanced efficiency and negotiation capabilities, and eliminate unnecessary resource allocation by streamlining operations