The challenge

SEG Automotive had a resourceful procurement team with well-defined KPIs aligned to its objectives. Despite having a clear reporting process in place, the company faced numerous issues that made the process inefficient and time-consuming.

SEG Automotive knew it needed to improve its procurement reporting and controlling to make insight-driven business decisions.

The company created a massive volume of data, but soaring operational cost and time barriers hindered them from exploiting it in real-time and at scale. Some of the key challenges the company faced were:

• Data largely scattered across systems: from ERPs to Excel sheets, making it difficult to manually link it and make informed, insight-driven decisions
• No single source of truth for category teams to find the insights they needed
• Manual and inefficient report creation and analysis process
• Data latency and lack of ability to slice and dice it

Hence, SEG Automotive turned to Ignite Procurement to improve its reporting, controlling, and operational efficiency and build a competitive advantage.

The solution

Procurement teams constantly strive towards savings and performance targets; hence, performance reporting is imperative to their success. But imagine a procurement reporting and controlling framework that can drive data-driven decision-making? That's the task before Ignite.

To provide a comprehensive solution to this problem, Ignite focused on three key goals:

• Make performance reporting accessible, proactive, and agile,
• Automate manual processes to address efficiency issues, and
• Utilize connected data to identify and support realization of opportunities.

To achieve these goals, Ignite and SEG Automotive took the following steps:

• Implement a tailored and well-executed process to consolidate data from multiple sources
• Cater a data transformation process through cleaning and enriching data in Ignite
• Provide visually compelling dashboards to present data
• Embed advanced analytics, insights, and negotiation packs to support dynamic decision making and highlight risks well in time

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The results

Implementing Ignite Procurement solution replaced the manual dashboard creation process with online, interactive dashboards. Additional features like self-service analytics tools with drill-down and click-of-a-button analysis helped SEG Automotive enjoy the following benefits:

• Improved data management, data quality, and reporting
• Significant time freed up to focus on value-creating tasks for controlling
• Category team with deeper and integrated insights on opportunities & risks
• Agile and proactive procurement performance management

Perhaps with the performance of this new procurement ecosystem, the company collaborated with Ignite to explore Ignite's Procurement Innovation project that focuses on how data science and third-party data can be leveraged for more advanced analytics and deeper insights. ​