SKY EUROPE
next thing was to turn to the tools available ,” Francalancia explains . “ Previously a Procurement Manager working in one country wouldn ’ t have had full visibility of requisitions coming in from the others – he had to call them first . But that is not the case anymore ”
Believing in better The big technical story is around the move from on-premises procurement systems to an integrated , cloudbased system . January 2017 saw the migration of all group procurement activities to SAP ’ s Ariba platform , which has made buying , contracting , and managing cash as easy and intuitive as using Amazon , eBay , and PayPal . It contributes scalability , mobility and above all transparency to the entire operation . Ariba Cloud is a procurement tool that manages sourcing and procurement processes from end to end in a single system used by all the users across the three countries .
Ariba helped the transformation of Sky procurement into a categorydriven organisation , one of Francalancia ’ s principal objectives .
Instead of a single individual in each of the five offices dealing with a particular category , such as hardware , software , editorial production , marketing or technology , teams now work as a centre of excellence in each category and are spread throughout the organisation . “ You can ’ t be an expert in 20 categories ,” Francalancia states , “ and if one individual is an expert in digital procurement for example , it is better that all three customer organisations get the benefit from that expertise .”
Today there are around 80 people reporting into him ; where they are sitting does not matter anymore . However , it isn ’ t true to say that procurement activity is limited to those 80 professionals . When a strategic procurement choice has to be made , an average of 10 people will typically be involved . Only two of those belong to the procurement team but the other eight are crucial to that decision , therefore part of what may be termed an extended virtual team . As he insists , systems , processes and people are three legs of the same stool . “ Category management across
98 May 2017