A $14bn multinational organization, operating in seeds and crop protection, was struggling to meet aggressive savings set targets by global Leadership.

In recent years, the procurement area had become over-focused on operational activities, rather than supplier relationship development or synergy capture between businesses, and functions were executing a significant amount of purchases without oversight from governance or policies.

Over the course of 10 multifunctional workshops, we supported the client to redesign the procurement area and structure, based on a clear purchasing strategy per category, revised processes and system requirements, and pain points raised by functions.

To ensure compliance across the organization, a governance process was designed involving the procurement team in all decisions.

The project was implemented in 10 countries, supported by change management actions to ensure all areas understood the new structure and the benefits that would be gained through the new way of working.

As a result, the client was able to reach the top-down saving targets (more than 10% of total spending), with 95% of orders inside the new policies.

The procurement area was able to and develop better relationships with suppliers.

To strengthen its portfolio, a multinational client in the field of seed production and technology development acquired a global competitor. Supply chain maturity was a key target in the Strategic Plan, and formed the basis of the integrated business’ competitive advantage.

The organization asked for Integration’s support to integrate the core supply chain processes, leveraging best practices to capture opportunities to improve quality, effectively manage capacity, and provide better service to customers.

We focused the project on planning and delivery processes, assessing the end-to-end steps to identify pain points and set priorities.

In delivery, we redesigned core processes to eliminate bottlenecks and meet service level targets, while in planning we clarified roles and responsibilities within the team, and implemented a new governance to improve day-to-day tracking and decision making.

Where necessary we adjusted the organization structure and systems to enable the new ways of working, and supported the team on the ground throughout the implementation.

The structural, governance and process changes were successfully embedded in the day-to-day, resulting in improved performance in critical indicators:

• 35% increase in On-Time
• 60% increase planning accuracy of the planning, leading to lower write-off

 Our client, a multinational B2C fertilizer producer, merged with a competitor of similar size operating in the B2B business (raw material sales and private label production). The new organization was one of the top 5 players worldwide.

The organization asked for Integration’s support to redesign the Go-to-Market, and overcome three key challenges;

• Develop competitive advantage in the supply chain beyond distributor management, in which the organization was already a national standard
• Increase margin
• Shift core product focus to a specialized, non-commodity product, which required a more technical sales approach

Our approach was divided between the two key segments for the merged organization, B2C and B2B:

In B2B, we worked with the sales team to incorporate best practices from the market and improve efficiency, reviewing pay-for-performance incentives, the key account model, and commercial policy.

In B2C, each distributor was assessed based on their ability to sell the new core product; favouring those with better technical knowledge within the sales team, or an exclusive partnership with the client. The client’s commercial structure was adjusted to meet the distributor needs in each region, alongside the necessary incentive and management models, to enable the shift in portfolio aligned with the strategy.

Throughout the project, we trained an internal resource to lead the project management after our exit.

The organization was able to increase their margins through the new core product, and experience a 4 year CAGR of 20%. The improvement in commercial efficiency was felt by clients, with a clear increase in scores demonstrated through quality satisfaction surveys.