“ The part that you can never control is the change management and people ”
ZAKARIA EL RHEZAOUI SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PROCUREMENT ,
UNIFONIC
“ I had to start everything from scratch . We worked on building the team , on putting in place the proper policy , processes , the training for people , working on a strategy for change management , because people had the habit of doing things by themselves , bringing in a new function that will control all the spend and control all the purchases was very new to them .”
The key challenge , admits El Rhezaoui , was that embedding procurement in a startup is not just a technical operation , but a human challenge .
And so he began by communicating to the workforce that the value of procurement lay in it bringing efficiencies that would help the business .
El Rhezaoui says : “ We explained to them that we will not delay their work , rather , we will automate it . Automation was a keyword in our journey because if we just focused on savings and compliance , we ’ d not have had the support we needed to meet our goal of speedy change management .”
Communicating intelligently with staff was crucial to the initiative a user- friendly procure-to-pay system was the foundation for a series of early successes for the team .
“ In the first year of the procurement function at Unifonic , we were able to achieve really great milestones , in terms of having a P2P system in place , which is functioning a hundred percent with an adoption rate of more than 90 %,” El Rhezaoui says .
This was coupled with more than US $ 1m in savings in the first year , along with a review of supplier and contract bases , to ensure every relationship was fully compliant . procurementmag . com 21