Syngenta Group Unifies Reporting with Procurement Performance Management
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Key Facts
- Multi-national agriculture business
- $19+ billion in revenue
- Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland
- 60,000 employees in 100 countries
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Challenges
A global Syngenta Group project aimed to provide over 200 Indirect Procurement staff with a unified reporting and savings tracking tool in order to support the 2021 Accelerate Program’s goal of doubling productivity across the business.
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Benefits
- Indirect Procurement implemented a single, centralized tool for tracking and reporting Procurement performance.
- Indirect Procurement established a flexible reporting framework that made progress toward Accelerate Program goals easy to track.
Syngenta Group: The world’s agricultural tech and innovation partner
Syngenta Group is one of the world’s leading providers of agricultural technology and solutions. Their offerings include seeds, crop protection and nutrition products, agronomic solutions, and digital services, all of which help farmers of all sizes address their problems and deliver greater productivity for global nutritional networks.
Context
In 2021, Syngenta Group launched the Accelerate Program, which aimed to double productivity across the newly formed global organization.
However, Indirect Procurement was now a single team, made up of several formerly independent business units with their own reporting tools and workflows.
Gerardo Aguilar, Global Head of Indirect Procurement
It’s very important that we can prove to the wider business that we have delivered on our savings targets year after year…With a procurement team of over 200 people in 32 countries, the challenge is ensuring we can demonstrate the results we’ve promised.
In order to meet the goals of the Accelerate Program, Gerardo Aguilar, Head of Indirect Procurement, knew he needed a way to centralize and unify reporting in one location.
Decision
In order to begin contributing to the Accelerate Program as quickly as possible, Aguilar turned to the market for a best-of-breed solution.
After evaluating approximately 10 solutions, he and his team selected SpendHQ’s Procurement Performance Management (PPM) for its
- Leading expertise in Performance Management
- User-friendliness
- Powerful visuals
- Centralized reporting environment
- Real-time access to information
- Collaboration and interconnection capabilities
I’m very grateful with the [SpendHQ] team because very often when you go through the sales pitch, you hear a lot of things that when you go into implementation you never see. And I think I have to give a lot of credit to the team that whatever they mention during the sales pitch process, everything came to reality.
Outcomes
Following a rapid successful implementation of PPM, Indirect Procurement at the Syngenta Group overdelivered the Accelerate Program’s targets by 48%.
Aguilar credits several facets of SpendHQ’s PPM as instrumental to this success.
Implementation timeline
With Syngenta Group’s ambitious goals, the team could not wait six months to a year for a usable platform. To provide the solution the team needed,
SpendHQ implemented and launched PPM in only three months.Adoption
As Aguilar explained,
PPM would only be effective if the entire team used it. Because it was intended to consolidate several existing workflows, PPM’s ease of use was a key ingredient to success.Flexibility
Aguilar also explained that customizable reporting was essential in a complex, ambitious global business like Syngenta Group. PPM’s customizable dashboards and reports made it easy to represent data effectively to his multiple stakeholders.
I can tell you I have a lot of different reports already made for myself and my leadership team about how we want to see the data… There are a lot of ways to see the data and the flexibility that the tool brings to be able to design your own views is fantastic.
Strong visuals
Data visualization also empowered Syngenta Group’s reporting. As Aguilar explained, “Everybody in the project team and outside the project team got very familiar with the reporting. And as I said, we were able to customize a lot of different reports to different stakeholders.”Pace of data refreshes
Finally, Aguilar cited the on-demand access to real-time data updates. Where the team had to wait for other tools to sync and update data, SpendHQ’s PPM allowed the team to access and review data as soon as it was entered into the tool. Particularly, this allowed Aguilar and other leaders to access global information on-demand.
At the end of the day, I don’t have to bother [my team]. If I need information about a specific program, project, or initiative, I can drill down right. And now the functionality is fantastic. From an overall picture of a global program with more than 7000 projects, I can drill down to any specific initiative and actually get the details. That brings a lot of efficiency for the buyers and that’s why they are willing to invest more at the beginning for the stakeholders.
What’s next for Syngenta Group
Indirect Procurement at Syngenta Group refers to SpendHQ’s PPM internally as Value Track, because it enables the team to deliver more than real-time reporting. The combination of visibility and best practices sharing allows the team to focus on the right opportunities and harmonize operations across different business units. “It felt like we had moved from having a procurement tool to using a business tool,” Aguilar added.
We know that our KPI is to start with savings. It’s our bread and butter. But in the future, we want to make sure that we continue delivering our total value contribution. Like it was part of the program; we have some examples that we delivered: a lot of sustainability benefits, environmental benefits, total ownership contribution, total cost of ownership. So that’s why we call it Value Track, and the tool is positioned in a perfect way to help us continue our major maturity goal in the future.