Fortune 10 major transforms its procurement ecosystem and reduces annual accruals by $40 million

Highlights
  • Customer

    Fortune 10 company

  • Industry

    Aviation

Benefits
  • $40 million worth of reduction in account payables holding amounts
  • $1.2 million annual savings due to improved productivity and better governance
  • 100% compliance to company policies and guidelines
  • Reduction in procurement cycle times from purchase requisition to payments
  • Elimination of 179,000 vendor data defects which mitigated potential failures
  • Radical improvement in strategic decision making at the back of better supplier analysis
Business Situation

The aviation major's sourcing and procurement processes and systems were incapable of handling 60,000+ strategic suppliers to support its manufacturing operations. A state-of-the-art supplier management system was needed to enable the strategic decision-making.

Business Challenges

The client's aggressive M&A activities had resulted in a diversified and disintegrated portfolio of applications, and the legacy sourcing and procurement system led to following issues:

  • Delayed payments to suppliers, leading to deviations from firm’s finance and accounting principles
  • The delay in payments had a cascading effect on future projects that required commitment from suppliers
  • Opportunity loss emanating from low economies of scale while purchasing material from suppliers
  • Senior management struggled to review the deviations leading to strategic drifts in decision making

This called for a technology overhaul, and sourcing and procurement process that would consolidate and convert all the aviation systems locations (20+) from their existing legacy ERP solutions on to Oracle E-Business Suite, and release R12 with standard business processes and sunset 50+ legacy applications.

Birlasoft Solution

Birlasoft created new processes, revamped existing ones, and integrated disparate applications including ERPs (Oracle and SAP for HR, general ledger and projects data) and other suites encompassing account payables, procurement, finance and accounting, and business reporting.

The solution allowed the company’s leadership get a real-time view of procurement, supplier payment and supplier collaboration. It also helped the company optimize costs by having a single application for payment processing, and drive price negotiation with suppliers.