eTender
In this interview, find a practical advice from the organizer of commercial procurement for a manufacturing enterprise. How to start and what successes a company can achieve with the help of an electronic platform.
Delta Wilmar Ukraine is a leading manufacturer of fat-and-oil products in Ukraine, specializing in the production of edible oils and fats.
The-company is part of the international holding company Wilmar International Limited, one of the largest agribusiness groups globally, with major markets in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, focusing on edible oils, grains, sugar, and related agribusiness products.
At the end of 2021, Delta Wilmar Ukraine LLC approached the eTender team with a strategic goal to digitize its procurement processes, streamline and expand its operations with counterparties, and reduce procurement costs.
Today, the company has achieved positive results for its business, and we decided to share their experience and our collaboration. Roman Sakun provides details on the implementation process and the results achieved.
Roman Sakun: Before implementing the eTender solution, our procurement processes were fragmented and managed manually. Considering the complex organizational structure of the company and the large procurement volumes, there was a clear need for additional control and risk management in procurement. Our company required a better understanding of benchmarks for key cost centers and transparency in the selection of primary and alternative suppliers.
For an industrial enterprise like ours, where procurement involves not only purchasing specialists but also technical experts, finance, and the security department, digitizing the process was a clear necessity to optimize the interaction between these roles.
Roman Sakun: Delta Wilmar Ukraine is part of the international corporation Wilmar International, which acquired the Ukrainian company Chumak in 2019. Since Chumak had already had a positive experience collaborating with eTender at the time of the decision, we decided to adopt the best practices implemented in our “sister” company’s project. Essentially, having a successful and similar implementation as a reference significantly simplified and expedited the transformation of Delta Wilmar’s procurement processes.
Roman Sakun: Today, the Delta Wilmar project represents an integrated procurement process that involves all necessary roles of the client and considers the company’s organizational structure. The cloud-based eTender solution includes the following platform modules
This module allows maintaining an up-to-date supplier registry, qualifying suppliers, forming "category pools", compiling dossiers, segmenting suppliers, and assigning statuses that can later affect the terms of collaboration. Typical users of this module include representatives from security, audit, finance, and management.
This module enables procurement specialists to create flexible procurement projects, conduct market monitoring, choose various bidding parameters, and determine the optimal winner(s).
Roman Sakun: Technical platform configuration, organizational preparation of the client, staff training by the eTender team, and conducting pilot procurements took one month.
Roman Sakun: Yes, absolutely, and significant savings at that. All tenders are conducted with reverse auctions, and this functionality works perfectly.
Roman Sakun: Undoubtedly. The primary goal when implementing the electronic platform was to ensure transparency in the work of procurement specialists. Previously, it was very difficult to assess the quality of their work, and there were countless arguments justifying high costs.
Roman Sakun: Yes, definitely. Previously, everything was managed exclusively via email and Excel, and processing tender results consumed a lot of time. The tender archive was disorganized, making it nearly impossible to find the necessary information. Now, everything is centralized, with extensive search capabilities, reports, and the security of a cloud-based solution. Creating a new tender is very fast, and if it’s a repeat tender, it takes just two clicks. Processing results now takes minutes, and approvals are also quick and transparent.
Roman Sakun: In the near future, we plan to configure integration between the procurement platform and the SAP ERP system to transfer processed procurement requests to the platform. This will automate the manual work of specialists and add more control points.
We appreciate that the platform is evolving in functionality, the eTender team listens to our suggestions, and they invest in cybersecurity. This allows us to worry less about data protection and focus more on improving the quality of our procurement processes.
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