TECHNOLOGY the company to better serve its customer base . Through its very nature , the procurement function needs to know and understand the demand , the market and the suppliers to deliver insights to the business and capitalise on the market .

Höchstödter points out that the procurement team has to accurately capture supplier data , contract data , material master data and operational process data , but more importantly the company has to be able to extract value from it , because all future analysis and development strategies within procurement are built from this data .

Working in an integrated environment is key to enable these activities . So , in addition Uniper decided to renew their Procurement platform to SAP ARIBA until the end of 2018 to create a new and user-friendly experience for their requesters , their suppliers and their purchasers . This will reduce the administrative effort and workload considerably . In parallel SAP Fieldglass has been implemented as a contingency workforce solution , which provides additional process stability .

“ Our systems like SAP ARIBA or SAP Fieldglass , our chatbot and our

ACD solution provide us with incredible amounts of operational data ,” says Höchstödter . “ When communicating with our requesters or a supplier , we pool the information we receive and can now use that information to target the key areas where we can develop and we can do it far quicker and more effective than ever before .”

As a procurement function , Susanne Thöle recognises that it can only be successful and can only achieve any real growth with a strong network of suppliers and key partners like SAP . “ Procurement is a strategic function

and , simply put , we ’ re trying to improve

23 europe . businesschief . com