Digital Procurement Transformation at DSM

In order to successfully transform your business, we highlight 6 key themes to keep in mind:

1. Business Case and Strategy: large-scale business transformations originate from your long-term vision for your Sourcing & Procurement capability. In order to realize your vision, a strategic roadmap is required, which outlines your transformation in smaller steps and clear business outcomes.
   
   
2. Master Plan & Design Approach: designing, setting up and executing large global transformation programs is a complex puzzle. Carefully plan your transformation, considering Global and Local process design, pilot setup vs. big bang roll-outs and a plan to make sure your stakeholders are aware and engaged. One key consideration is to start with a small-scale pilot in order to fully test the future process, ways of working and technology. A successful pilot also allows you to ‘sell’ the success internally for bigger roll-outs. Investing in a solid and widely supported Global Process Design reduces the localization effort during roll-outs.
   
   
3. Team Assembly: your team needs to have a common goal and mindset. The team needs a wide-ranging set of capabilities to drive Business Process Design, Change Management & Training, Supplier & Content Enablement and Master Data Management. In addition, you need a team to analyze organizational impact and define the right operating model, ways of working, policies & procedures and governance. During roll-outs, local support in Change Management, Enablement and project management underpin success.
   
   
4. Change Management & Adoption: successful adoption of the new process, solution and ways of working requires a strong and clear change management approach. Your approach needs to be tailored to the situation, audience, program phase, local culture & language and should be persona based. This way each persona receives exactly the right information and training, at the right time and in the right format.
   
   
5. Technical Solution: ensure that your technical solution, system architecture and data foundation facilitate the Global Design. When deploying cloud solutions, limit customizations as much as possible and only allow deviations from the Global Design in case of local legal/fiscal reasons or in case it will drive significant value.
   
   
6. Supplier & Content Enablement: next to engaging your internal organization, you need to make sure that the external ecosystem is aware of the transformation. Additionally, there are often required changes on the suppliers’ end they need to adopt to. Finally, working together with your suppliers to ensure that you have the right content and catalogs in your procure-to-pay solutions is critical for successful business adoption. Your end-users will not follow the desired buying channels if your solution is an empty shell. Since your supply base most likely consists of a large number of suppliers across the globe, you need a team to drive this (often locally) and a structured approach and wave planning.