CCI Gains Control & Visibility of Global Spend with PROACTIS
Worldwide purchase-to-pay deployment spans 22 locations in
14 countries
Profile
Control Components, Inc. (CCI) is a global provider of severe
service control valve solutions used in the power industry, oil and
gas industry, and pulp and paper plants globally. With headquarters
in California, CCI has sales and services offices with direct
employees located in 15 countries, and has representatives in over
60 other countries.
Challenge
Over its 50 year history, CCI has grown both organically and by
acquisition of a number of companies around the world. CCI now
serves a worldwide customer base with offices and facilities in the
Americas (United States, Mexico, Canada, and Brazil), Europe (UK,
Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Italy, and Czech Republic), Asia
(China, India, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore), and South
Africa.
Like many companies that have grown greatly over time, CCI found
itself with widely disparate information management systems across
the company. Although CCI executives recognised the advantages of
ultimately consolidating and standardising all of those systems on
a worldwide basis, they understood that such an undertaking would
take time. However, one area CCI knew was critical in taking to the
next level was that of managing indirect spend. There was also
little chance of instituting consistent authorisation controls,
policy and regulatory compliance, or centre-led procurement without
a single global Spend Control and eProcurement framework. CCI
therefore made deployment of a global Spend Control system, using
one common platform for all global locations, a top priority.
Why PROACTIS?
After looking at a number of alternatives, CCI selected the
PROACTIS Spend Control and eProcurement solution as the platform
for the company's worldwide purchase-to-pay system. PROACTIS was
selected for a number of reasons - one key reason being that it
would enable simple and rapid global deployment tailored to CCI's
business needs. In addition to providing multi-currency,
multi-language and multi-tax handling capabilities, PROACTIS had
the flexibility to manage workflow and other variations across
CCI's many different local organisations while maintaining a common
global framework of polices and controls.
Results
With a focused and concerted effort on the part of CCI's small
implementation team and the help of PROACTIS, the goal of rapid
global deployment was met. The system was configured and
implemented in less than three months at CCI's headquarters as the
initial pilot. With that under their belt, the CCI team went on to
roll-out the system across 22 locations in 14 countries in less
than seven months. Although, usage of the system is still expanding
and evolving in a number of ways, the entire initial worldwide
deployment was achieved in approximately nine months from start to
finish.
Today, nearly 100% of new supplier approvals and purchase
approvals go through one common system worldwide. Workflows for
supplier approvals ensure compliance with both company policies and
local regulations - for instance in China. Workflows for purchase
approval ensure compliance with a corporate approval matrix.
CCI's total spend is now being managed by the PROACTIS system.
Many ongoing services such as utilities, car leases, maintenance,
IT services, etc. are set up on blanket purchase orders, plus
discrete PO volume is approaching 500 a month. The range of people
directly using PROACTIS continues to increase with the number of
users approaching 400.
Although Accounts Payable functions are decentralised and use a
variety of different financial systems, each country now uses
PROACTIS as the basis for 3-way matching of incoming invoices
before authorising payment. Policy now requires a PO and receipt
for every discrete PO, so AP is able to act as a primary driver to
ensure transactional rigour. When there are discrepancies, AP
personnel in each country use PROACTIS workflow to resolve them in
a timely manner.
Cosmina Soaita, CCI Global Supply Chain Manager for Indirect
Spend summarises the progress CCI has made: "Before PROACTIS,
operations in each country had their own approach to selecting
suppliers, approving purchases, and authorising payments. And we
had no real visibility at the corporate level. Now, with PROACTIS
in place, it's a whole different story - we have consistent
compliance with corporate policies around the world, visibility of
all global activity, and a growing repository of purchase history
that we are using to take a more global approach to
procurement."
Looking to the future, Soaita says: "We can now analyse how many
suppliers we have in each spend category and look at transaction
details to see exactly what it is we're buying from each supplier.
We're using this information to start rationalising our supplier
base and better leverage our global buying power. Over time
that is going to enable us to further reduce costs in a substantial
way."
