Procurement Lessons from Sinterklaas

A world famous procurement expert, Sinterklaas gives us some very interesting insights on how he is using procurement automation to make sure he delivers all his gifts on time. It is an extremely busy time of the year for him. We were extremely happy he could spare some of his for this rendezvous.

 You have been delivering gifts all these years on time without fail! You must be facing a lot of challenges while procuring all these gifts, how do you manage?

Ah! Well, yes I do have to face enormous challenges, but I have an excellent team who make my job easy. Now since the whole world has gone digital, I am using an automated solution to make the procurement process easy and efficient.

 To buy this humongous number of presents you must be having a very strong supplier management strategy in place. How do you implement it?

Absolutely! We work with numerous suppliers across the globe. We foster long term partnerships so as to reduce costs, and provide the best quality.

Zycus’s iSupplier and iPerform modules have made my life a lot easier. They help me on-board suppliers and measure supplier performance and develop suppliers, thereby, reducing supply chain risk.

 You are a sort of procurement expert, would you like to say something about the procurement knowledge you have gained over the years?

I simply categorise my procuremrnt requirement according to the The Purchasing Portfolio, Kraljic, 1983

Routine (Low risk and low spend): For my routine gifts for example books, clothes, toys I use Contract Management so that my maverick spend is less.

Leverage (Low risk and high spend): These are the commodities commonly used across the entire organization with high volume. Even for gifts for which markets are served by a few suppliers with extensive distribution networks. I use Catalogue Management software to reduce time spent looking for items and track order prices and history.

Bottleneck (High risk and low spend): These are for highly specialized goods, services or works. For requests like , a solar powered toy car often there are only a few potential suppliers, and usually there are only a few transactions in this category car I make use of the Procure -to-Pay Solution which helps me in Inventory Management and Dynamic Discounting so that I can manage my spends well.

Strategic (High risk and high spend): Represents goods, services or works that are critical to the process. This often requires innovative solutions and high level expertise from suppliers. The Complete Source-to-Pay Suite has made my life easy by providing by helping me manage relationship and performance through regimes and systems which are essential to secure value for money and reduce risk.

Thank you so much! We really appreciate the time.