Criteo is well-known in France’s tech industry as the country’s first unicorn company, an independent player in the digital advertising ecosystem, and an established international leader in Commerce Media.

Founded in 2005, Criteo is renowned for enabling marketers and media owners around the world to achieve better business results. Its market-leading Commerce Media platform connects 19,000 marketers to thousands of media owners and, allowing advertisers to deliver richer consumer experiences from product discovery to purchase. Criteo has 3,500 employees and 750 million active users every day.

Facilitaging Operational Excellence: From Excel to a Unified Solution

Cyril Frances, Chief Procurement Officer at Criteo, oversees a team of eight, including seven category managers and a tools and processes manager. Together, they lead Indirect Procurement. Until 2020, the team relied on Excel to coordinate initiatives and monitor their progress. However, this process introduced several issues including limited project visibility, unclear priority levels, time-consuming manual spreadsheet checks, and opportunities for human error.
In a group with more than 3,500 team members, sharing information and updates on Indirect Procurement’s activities remained complex and suffered from:

• Lack of data traceability and reliability
• Low visibility into updates
• Coexistence of numerous project tracking files

Cyril wanted to develop greater visibility and collaborative tools to simplify his team day-to-day and optimize Indirect Procurement’s performance.

“We needed a flexible tool to manage Procurement Performance and improve fluidity across the organisation. We were looking for a solution that was ergonomic, simple, and quick to deploy.”

Integrating and Monitoring Projects, Contracts and Savings

To optimize the customer experience and maximize his team’s impact, Cyril turned to the platform his peers called the only tool designed for monitoring procurement performance: SpendHQ’s PPM. Cyril and his team chose PPM and deployed the solution at the end of 2020. Once the tool was live, they quickly appreciated the ease of use and granularity that PPM offered, particularly in terms of:

• Visibility and management of procurement projects
• Real-time savings tracking
• Proactive contract deadlines management
• Simplified supplier management

The presence of the Contracts module was indeed a key factor in Cyril’s decision, because it allowed his team to view suppliers and associated contracts at a glance. “Beyond tracking procurement performance and budgeting in the tool via dashboards, the great strength of SpendHQ’s PPM solution remains its ability to align procurement opportunities, savings, contracts and suppliers.”

The flexibility of SpendHQ’s PPM solution further optimized Criteo’s procurement processes by introducing visibility and efficient communication. Now, Criteo’s indirect procurement teams rely on the platform daily for its:

• Intuitive user interface, which encourages long-term adoption,
• Rich functionality, which addresses the day-to-day issues buyers face.
• Time-saving capabilities in the Dashboard module that enable active procurement management and real-time data analysis and faster decision making
• Customizable admin configuration without relying on an integrator or a third-party IT department.
• Holistic visibility, which facilitates communication, reduces administrative workload, and produces a real return on investment.

“It’s a light, plug-and-play solution that’s quick and easy to use. It only took two months to deploy SpendHQ.”

Procurement Expertise and Customer Focus: The Perfect Combination

As Criteo’s business is constantly evolving, the platform set up had to be quickly adjusted to meet the needs of the procurement department. The Criteo team was able to draw on the business expertise of SpendHQ’s Customer Success team, made up of former procurement practitioners and PPM users, to adapt the solution to meet Criteo’s new needs.

“One of SpendHQ’s strengths is its Customer Success Managers, who are very attentive and act as true ‘partners’. We benefited from their advice and procument expertise when we wanted to change our initial settings to better reflect the evolution of our procurement organisation.”

Today, Cyril wants to take the solution’s functionalities a step further by expanding its use, potentially to include monitoring non-financial performance. However, one thing is certain—there’s a lot to look forward to in a company that’s focused on continuous improvement!