Procurement transformation program to reduce spend by $1 billion

A global industrial manufacturing company wanted to transform their procurement process to achieve savings across business groups and spend categories. Their aim was to reduce spend by $1 billion. However, the individuals involved were highly distributed geographically and belonged to five different business groups and ten spend categories. The organization was struggling with how to best capture savings ideas, monitor their progress, and report on actual savings generated.

The team used Wave as a centralized tracking system. They began with 700 initiatives and quickly expanded to more than 1,200 based on ideas and cost-saving proposals gathered from across the organization, all within a timeframe of just 12 months.

Wave helped in the following ways:

• Structuring the transformation program by product and functional groups
• Centralizing management of all initiatives end to end, including submission and approval of new savings ideas
• Providing high-level feedback and detailed reporting on program impact
• Reporting on key metrics, that is., savings achieved, using standard and custom reports
• Providing reports for weekly project-management-office (PMO) meetings

Since implementing Wave, $150 million have been saved through initiatives managed within the platform, and a culture of continuous improvement is being promoted by collecting new ideas from over 100 users, which, if approved, are then automatically incorporated into the transformation program.

Additionally, reports from Wave on the program have reduced time spent by PMO team members from an average of 1.5 days a week consolidating data from various spreadsheets and multiple sources to 6 minutes a week.

The company is currently rolling out Wave in additional savings programs, such as product margin improvement, pricing, and logistics.