The Challenge
The client had grown through 11 successive acquisitions across 12 European markets. Each acquired company brought its own ERP, local suppliers, payment terms, and, hardest of all, its own procurement culture. No consolidated view. Duplicated categories. Price variance of 2 to 3x on identical services within the same country.
The brief was direct: build the French procurement function from zero, and lay the foundations of a procurement function that acts as a true business partner, bringing both value and the rigour of a sound procurement and finance process.
What I Found
Shadow procurement was everywhere. Spend lines were not aligned: multiple suppliers for the same spend depending on the entity, sometimes different prices and methods with the same supplier across entities. No procurement project pipeline. We received invoices and tried to figure out who owned them and whether they should even be paid.
On data: 3 different ERPs, no shared category taxonomy, hundreds of unmapped GL accounts. Before we could talk strategy, we had to reunify the data.
The Approach
Year 1, Foundation. Data consolidation across 3 ERPs in 90 days, spend analysis on the €1bn EU portfolio. Identification of the 8 categories that warranted a strategy, using Kraljic market by market. Those 8 represented 70% of addressable spend.
Project pipeline. Worked with each business function to win adoption of the procurement approach and build a strategic project pipeline.
Hub-and-spoke governance. Central category leads (France and EU), local buyer teams as spokes. Central owns strategy and framework contracts. Spokes own local execution and the proximity supplier relationship. Neither full-central (which ignores country nuance) nor full-local (which loses synergies).
4 sourcing waves in Year 1. Sequenced by impact: start with high-leverage, low-political-risk categories (maintenance, services), end with the complex ones (Infrastructure OPEX, see the Circular Economy case, and Consulting). Every wave followed the same protocol: Kraljic, spend analysis, Porter, cost breakdown, RFP. Above all, a clear intent to deliver each business unit's vision through procurement.
The special case of the maintenance contract. A park of 20,000+ sites to maintain (preventive, curative, reactive), tens of millions of euros to allocate across several vendors, and a willingness to experiment with an innovative model: move from a Unit Price Schedule (BPU) approach to a fixed average annual price per site. We co-invented this model with suppliers to make it work. Result: 10%+ savings (vs. 7% on the classic BPU approach) and the identification of better technical and environmental solutions. A win on every front. Procurement stepped out of its administrative role and started being pulled in by every business function.