Silo Busting: Using savings management to drive collaboration
In a perfect world, savings management should follow a clear pattern: set targets, identify then prioritise initiatives, track initiatives and, finally, review the targets. However, managers know that in reality, these five steps are beset with difficulty. They have to deal with unknown targets and goals, manual inputting, approval difficulties, siloed projects, sporadic monitoring and, worst of all, focus on the wrong projects.
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How to bust silos when nothing seems to work
Many of the woes besetting procurement professionals can be traced back to organisational silos, which hamper effective communication, hinder compliance, and impede transparency. You’ve tried everything to improve collaboration – from issuing company-wide news bulletins, increasing the number and frequency of interdepartmental meetings, and even drastically altering the seating arrangements … but sometimes, silo-type behaviour is just ingrained. No doubt, you have wished there was some sort of silver bullet that will do away with silos once and for all.
According to SciQuest’s Karen Sage, there is. Sage is excited about launching a new solution that will bring everyone on board with procurement savings initiatives. “Our new Portfolio Savings Manager (PSM) is really going to hit those organisational silos hard”, says Sage. “It encourages interaction, creating cross-collaboration within the business. You’ll have all of these different silos working together on your procurement savings initiatives, and those frustrating savings management difficulties have been ironed out into a seamless and efficient process.”
SciQuest has been in the spend management space for a long time – 20 years, in fact – and services a wide range of industries and organisations including many of the Global Fortune 500. Customers using SciQuest’s Source-to-Settle Suite wanted a way to track projects in a single interface that incorporates multiple aspects of the procurement process, whether it be savings tracking, project management or workflow management. The company responded with the creation of the innovative PSM, which can be used as a stand-alone product, but its full functionality is revealed when integrated with the existing Source-to-Settle Suite.
The cross-functionality of PSM enables team members in any department, from sourcing and procurement to finance and operations, to:
- identify potential savings and process optimisation projects
- approve and prioritise initiatives
- assign tasks and allocate resources
- track milestones and results, and
- monitor progress against forecast and budget.
The system is a project-manager’s dream, automatically determining milestones and tasks required to complete initiatives and allocate resources. PSM replaces tedious manual processes such as spreadsheet inputting, project tracking and database updating. It captures strategies and savings initiatives from inception to realisation, forecasting, scheduling, tracking and reporting savings. Users benefit from historical project and savings visibility, without having to dig into the database or spreadsheets for lost information.
Savings management made simple in five steps
PSM users follow an intuitive five-step process, with a focus on simplicity throughout:
1. Identification
Users are guided through the completion of a savings initiative creation with the aid of a left-side navigation section that indicates counts and completeness.
- Authorisation
Approval workflows are applied to the initiative based on business compliance requirements.
- Prioritisation
The user assigns a priority to each initiative on a scale of 1 to 10. Priorities can be adjusted to reflect current business and resource parameters.
- Execution
Deliverables and tasks assignees can update their tasks status, mark them in-progress, complete or reset the due date.
- Achievement
Reports and graphs are automatically generated and displayed on customised dashboards.
Having the right system in place enables procurement professionals to stop spending valuable time trying to persuade unwilling cross-departmental colleagues to collaborate. Concentrate instead on getting everyone interacting with your new system, see the silos melt away, and watch the savings flow.
SciQuest’s Portfolio Savings Manager will be available for purchase in July 2016. For more information, please visit www.SciQuest.com.
