Keolis

Procurement’s Mission: Transform the Organization

For more than 100 years, Keolis has been helping people like you travel safely, comfortably, and efficiently. The company embraces the mindset of “thinking like a passenger” in all that they do – so everyone has an enjoyable and unforgettable experience on the rail and transit operations Keolis manages. In fact, Keolis is the leading provider of passenger transformation throughout the United States and Canada.

In 2019, the Procurement function of Keolis North America was created to transform the organization. Historically, the organization operated as a standalone business with the four subsidiaries having little collaboration and cooperation. In fact, this new Procurement function was designed to transform the organization by:

• Improving profitability and performance
• Collaborating across subsidiaries to improve opportunity identification
• Identifying pricing and supplier consolidation efforts

“The primary goal was to reduce the number of suppliers and improve the cost structure. In fact, we had about 3,500 suppliers in the company and 70% of those suppliers were responsible for about 20% of the spend. So, supplier consolidation was an important upfront priority.”

Abraham Saxionis, Chief Procurement Officer, Keolis North America.

A Single Solution for a Global Procurement Team to Collaborate

The team quickly formed with four procurement directors reporting to Abraham and more than 20 people who were directly dedicated to strategic sourcing. The business quickly developed a mandate to improve Financial performance and profitability through cost reduction. Procurement was responsible for more than half of the cost reductions, which created a need for technology that could:

• Enhance capabilities and reduce manual tasks
• Provide a source of truth for all projects and progress toward cost reduction goals
• Support the business mandate by improving pricing by reducing suppliers

Procurement took the lead in setting the objective for tracking the savings goals and progress. Everyone needed access to the data and information to report of Financial performance and share the impact of their work. The team had a lack of best practices to properly coordinate on cross-functional projects, so that is one of the biggest reasons the Keolis Group selected Per Angusta and implemented it across the organization at corporate and local levels in North America. Everyone has a way to better track, monitor, and report on progress toward the mandate from corporate. In addition, the team has benefited from better internal consolidation, such as a single contract repository for better contract management. Previously, the team was always struggling with finding, locating, and saving the latest contracts for the business.

“Our team was quickly impressed with the ease of learning and features within Per Angusta. The reporting functionalities are extremely helpful. Everyone has embraced the tool positivity – our team is very satisfied.”

Abraham Saxionis, Chief Procurement Officer, Keolis North America.

A Powerful Technology That Brings Everyone Together

The implementation of Per Angusta was straightforward. Each unit participated in the training, which resulted in feeding team projects and individual projects to establish a forecast and project pipeline. Because of the collected subsidiary data, the Procurement team can easily follow the budget and support the business through the process.

“A key success factor is that everyone has a common technology. Everyone is reporting from the same data and capturing progress for every person and every project that supports the business mandate. Per Angusta creates a single source of truth with certified and up-to-date information for everyone.”

Abraham Saxionis, Chief Procurement Officer, Keolis North America.

In addition, the Finance team has been positive about the set of records and reports provided by Per Angusta. The biggest benefits of using Per Angusta include:

• Creating a seamless way to report and manage projects
• Real-time monitoring of progress to ensure the team delivers on-time
• Developing a global view of different projects that connect to the business mandate
• Getting results certified and stored for future monitoring and controlling efforts

Now, Procurement feels more comfortable and confident about the reports they are sharing with the Corporate function and key stakeholders. Because Per Angusta is extremely user-friendly, user adoption has been successful as well. The Procurement Directors can quickly and easily make changes without any issues or roadblocks. The dashboard feature makes finding and sharing relevant information easy and timely.

Moving forward, Keolis has an ambitious goal to become more streamlined and collaborative by focusing on Strategic Sourcing and Performance Management; Per Angusta will help support this effort. The team will continue to capture data in Per Angusta and use those insights to make informed business decisions. Today, Per Angusta is a common practice to deliver the information needed to help the business succeed and achieve a greater Financial impact for Keolis.

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