Customer Spotlight
Global Procurement Visibility Comes Easier Than Expected
In the modern business landscape, it’s nearly unavoidable for a Procurement organization to deal with messy data and inefficient collaboration stemming from disparate, fragmented technical ecosystems. For large, multi-national corporations, data challenges and execution silos can roadblock the path to strategic impact.
Meet Thermo Fisher Scientific, the $40+ billion world leader in serving science with multiple brands and operations spanning the globe. Thermo Fisher provides many of the solutions advancing public health around the world. Yet despite its widespread impact, the company’s Procurement data was fragmented and had several limiting factors stifling its impact.
First, unifying Procurement efforts and reporting across Thermo Fisher’s multiple brands was challenging and effort-intensive. While each team’s work was effective on its own, fragmentation and silos limited cross-functional collaboration between category teams and business units that would have deepened Procurement’s impact. To remove these roadblocks and strengthen the team’s strategic impact, Thermo Fisher turned to SpendHQ.
“We want the solutions in our tech stack to align to industry best practices. SpendHQ reduced the time we spend managing systems as well as collecting and processing data. This allows us to focus on driving process, data quality, and analytics improvements.”
Unifying Procurement with 360-degree visibility
To turn a global organization into a unified vehicle for strategic business impact, Blessen Kurian, Thermo Fisher’s Procurement Director, Digital and Data Science, understood that he needed to centralize management and condense reporting into a single source of truth. To accomplish this, the Procurement team chose SpendHQ’s Performance Management.
Performance Management is an easy-to-implement platform that brings important visibility to Procurement projects, forecasts, and results across the organization. Built around a full project pipeline, opportunities module, ESG and supplier tracker, customizable dashboards, and a host of data integrations, the platform helps teams allocate resources effectively and evaluate their results for continuous improvement.
This framework would unify the Procurement teams and allow them to combine their efforts for deeper impact and stakeholder trust.
Using Performance Management, Procurement formed a 13-person cross-functional team to unify Direct and Indirect Procurement across Thermo Fisher. Less than two years later, the now-unified team has created tens of thousands of projects and individual savings reports.
Bringing it all together with spend visibility
Despite the radical impact that Performance Management had on Thermo Fisher’s operations and reporting capabilities, the Procurement team still had a limiting factor—fragmented spend data. Because Thermo Fisher’s spend data was spread across ERP systems, finding savings opportunities was time-intensive and difficult.
Kurian knew data consolidation was the optimal path forward, so he turned to SpendHQ’s spend analytics solution, Spend Intelligence. In just over a month, SpendHQ extracted and normalized data from 10,000+ files to assemble a comprehensive spend cube.
Leveraging SpendHQ’s international data processing team and machine learning algorithm, Thermo Fisher now facilitates monthly data refreshes for spend visibility across the organization. As part of this process, SpendHQ automated 80% of Thermo Fisher’s monthly, manual data validation processes.
Consolidating global spend into a single platform allowed Thermo Fisher to further amplify Procurement’s impact in several ways. By creating a standard view of spend and improvement opportunities, trust between category teams, business units, and stakeholders was established.
Procurement’s performance was further crystallized by pairing the execution data in Performance Management with corresponding spend data and analytics. This visibility made it easy to prove Procurement’s value and increase buy-in by pinpointing opportunities for change.
Most importantly though, leveraging both Spend Intelligence and Performance Management has opened the path to cross-brand collaboration on both financial and strategic non-financial projects. Instead of working in silos, Thermo Fisher’s Procurement teams are now able to cross-pollinate their efforts for organization-wide impact, resulting in hundreds of projects and savings reports recorded in Performance Management each month.
As Kurian said, “We want the solutions in our tech stack to align to industry best practices. SpendHQ reduced the time we spend managing systems as well as collecting and processing data. This allows us to focus on driving process, data quality, and analytics improvements.”
Thermo Fisher Scientific isn’t done innovating yet. The team is now excited about the possibilities that emerging artificial intelligence solutions offer, especially regarding SpendHQ’s lofty integration library. Notably, Thermo Fisher is in the early stages of exploring the integration between Spend Intelligence and Performance Management, which would further streamline the strategic Procurement optimization process.