written by
Lore De Jonge

Procurement: defining collaboration on a group level

Me@BESIX Me@SixConstruct Me@Socogetra Me@Vanhout Me@BESIX Infra me@BELEMCO Me@JacquesDelens Me@FrankiFoundations Me@Cobelba Me@Vandenberg Group 1 min read

Start of the workshops in entities

If you had the opportunity to read Stéphane Brès' interview in this month's Inside (page 6), there is no doubt you are fully convinced of the added value of optimizing purchasing at group level. So we spend better and less and can benefit from volume leverage and savings to everyone’s advantage: your client, the BESIX group, your project and you.

A key success factor is of course the good collaboration between all stakeholders, whether they are involved in tendering, project or purchasing, local, regional or global.

You are certainly asking yourself: how is this going to happen in concrete terms? What will change?

The answer to these questions is not uniform and will depend on the specificities and needs of each entity. The way of collaborating will result from a co-creation between each entity and the Procurement team, with Change Management support from the duo Larissa Gilleman (Global Expert People Agility) and Alexandra Grossmann (Change Facilitator), who joined in early January.

To initiate this collaboration and new way of working, we are planning, together with each entity, workshops to be held by the end of June, based on a methodology that we have tested and validated during a pilot workshop with Vanhout on Thursday March 5.

Bringing together 21 participants, both from Vanhout (tendering, engineering, projects, cost controlling and purchasing) and representatives of the Group Procurement team, this workshop allowed us to get to know each other better, but above all, to ensure that all had the same understanding of the main operating principles of Procurement, as well as the role of each other.

In view of the improvements brought by this new approach, the group discussed the best way to work in good collaboration, whether between the different levels (local/regional /global), but also from an 'end-to-end' perspective (tender/procurement /project).

The conclusions shared and discussed at the end of the session with Greet Geens (Technical office director) and Kris Knaepen (Technical director), will result in an action plan that Vanhout will implement in the coming months in close collaboration with the Group Procurement.

Rome was not built in one day and this workshop is the first step of a collaboration to achieve the savings objectives of the group.

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