Ask a Procurement Pro

by Alex Saric

As a global source-to-pay solutions provider, we serve enterprises in industries ranging from manufacturing, high-tech, retail and healthcare. This means we have access to customers facing unique challenges in critical areas of procurement such as spend, control, risk and compliance. As an organization, we are mindful to keep up-to-date on industry trends, news and difficulties faced by modern procurement organizations. So far this year, we’ve hosted a variety of webinars ranging from managing tail spend, key issues  and how technology can positively improve supplier and contracting. We think we can do more.

We’ve just debuted a brand new webinar series, “Ask a Procurement Pro.” It is our hope that this new webcast series will be a resource for procurement executives who are having trouble grappling with complexities within their organization. Our goal here is to enable procurement professionals become a more strategic partner for their companies and create an impact beyond the bottom line.

CACI provides information solutions and services in support of national security missions and government transformation for Intelligence, Defense, and Federal Civilian customers. CACI achieve:

• 95% spend under management
• 95% P2P compliance and supplier enablement
• 30% operating cost reduction
• 30% identified savings
• 100% employee adoption

The webcast was well attended and we received many questions before the webinar and during the Q&A. Here are highlights:

Q: What have you found to be most effective and dealing with stakeholders and change management as you went through the transformation?

Early communication and early buy-in was key in effectively dealing with the transformation. Communicating early and often allowed everyone to know what was transpiring, which in return, became an easy sell of the application to both internal and external users.

Q: How do you upscale or rescale teams?

The first task was to let go of the old ways of doing things. Next, we discussed the importance of utilizing the people who had the technology experience. We thought it was important to use the train the trainer approach to help all the employees succeed in the new environment while simultaneously maintaining the human element and making sure to lend assistance where we could. We were able to move people across departments to upscale teams. Additionally, since this transformation involves taking people out of a data integral, and elevating them to become managers of data, it actually opened up opportunity to many of our procurement staff.

Q: How did CACI integrate Ivalua into their legacy/ERP and Supplier systems?

The most important thing that you have to know is the “Big Data” that you want to share between these systems. I classify Big Data as anything to do with your account, projects, location, etc. This information is shared with the Ivalua tool, and it is fed into the tool every two hours. The IT team monitors everything, including dynamic data like PO’s and invoices, which are moved back and forth between ERP and the Ivalua application. To keep the ERP and Ivalua systems unified and integrated, both the ERP and P2P teams communicate when they are adding or doing anything.