Ser­vi­ca mod­ern­ized pur­chase process with SAP Ari­ba Guid­ed Buy­ing solution

Ser­vi­ca Oy is a Finnish in-house com­pa­ny that pro­vides its own­er-cus­tomers with food, prop­er­ty and clean­ing ser­vices, equip­ment main­te­nance and assis­tive device main­te­nance ser­vices, as well as mate­r­i­al and trans­port logis­tics ser­vices in the Northern Savonia region. Ser­vi­ca’s ser­vice pro­duc­tion start­ed at the begin­ning of 2012 and it cur­rent­ly employs about 1800 peo­ple.

Ser­vi­ca’s logis­tics ser­vices take care of their cus­tomers’ prod­ucts cost-effec­tive­ly until they reach their des­ti­na­tion. Mod­ern dig­i­tal­ized pur­chase solu­tion  and a month­ly con­sol­i­dat­ed invoice, as well as site-spe­cif­ic deliv­er­ies, are includ­ed in Ser­vi­ca’s flex­i­ble service.

Ser­vi­ca’s strat­e­gy is to deliv­er excel­lent cus­tomer expe­ri­ences and to ensure that Ser­vi­ca is able to both net­work more close­ly and grow with own­er-cus­tomers in the future. In addi­tion, the strate­gic goal is to make oper­a­tions increas­ing­ly sus­tain­able and trans­par­ent, as well as more effi­cient and pro­duc­tive. The project with Islet aimed to sup­port these strate­gic goals.

Project scope and imple­ment­ed solution

Based on SAP Ari­ba Guid­ed Buy­ing and SAP Busi­ness Net­work, the Sel­ma store serves 30 order­ing orga­ni­za­tions and deliv­ers to more than 4000 dif­fer­ent ship­ping address­es. Through the Sel­ma store, end users  can order from more than 8000 items in the Ser­vi­ca cat­a­logue, or from more than 150 oth­er sup­pli­er cat­a­logs (direct sup­pli­ers).

Sel­ma store offers its more than 2000 users three order­ing chan­nels: cat­a­log-based order­ing (Ser­vi­ca’s range, as well as direct sup­pli­ers), form-based order­ing of equip­ment and sup­plies, and free text order­ing.

Select­ing co-oper­a­tion part­ner

As its part­ner for the imple­men­ta­tion Ser­vi­ca select­ed Islet Group, with whom it has a his­to­ry of well-func­tion­ing coop­er­a­tion in the field of ERP and pro­cure­ment devel­op­ment.

Lessons learned and suc­cesses of the pro­ject

In addi­tion to a suc­cess­ful out­come, the project also gave valu­able lessons for sim­i­lar projects in the future. For exam­ple, it is a good idea to start to eval­u­ate, har­mo­nize and clean mas­ter data as ear­ly as pos­si­ble, even before start­ing the project. Succeeding on sched­ule also requires strong inter­nal coor­di­na­tion and change man­age­ment. Phas­ing the busi­ness go-live can reduce deploy­ment risks and ensure suf­fi­cient capac­i­ty of inter­nal resources, for exam­ple from the per­spec­tive of end-user train­ing and sup­port.

Ben­e­fits of the solu­tion

The solu­tion result­ed in sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent areas. It can be used to ensure con­tract com­pli­ance more effec­tive­ly, for exam­ple by min­i­miz­ing mav­er­ick spend by track­ing costs at a more accu­rate lev­el in real time and tak­ing full advan­tage of vol­ume dis­counts. The solu­tion is built in such a way that each user is shown only the infor­ma­tion that is rel­e­vant and cor­rect to them based on the role, as well as only the items and ser­vices avail­able for them. Thus, the new pur­chas­ing por­tal enables dig­i­tized and effi­cient process­es, and it guides the buy­er through­out the process. This saves time, pre­vents mis­takes and ensures con­tract com­pli­ance.

The solu­tion has also con­tributed to smoother sup­pli­er coop­er­a­tion and increased the lev­el of pur­chase order automa­tion. It enables close coop­er­a­tion between the sup­pli­er and the cus­tomer, on a sin­gle plat­form, through­out the entire process, from cat­a­log to pur­chase order cre­ation and fur­ther to deliv­ery con­fir­ma­tion.

Man­ag­ing the process with an inte­grat­ed solu­tion, cen­tral­ly in one place, ensures bet­ter real-time vis­i­bil­i­ty into the orga­ni­za­tion’s total spend and pur­chas­es, and enables the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of key areas for improve­ment in the over­all pro­cure­ment process.

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