ASG Group has been recognized as a WBA Winner for Supply Chain Management in the World Business Awards 2022. The World Business Award for Supply Chain Management [SCM] recognizes organizations that have successfully implemented initiatives that demonstrate excellence in supply chain management.

ASG’s Procurement function is designed to facilitate the purchase and reselling of third-party products to ASG’s internal and external customers. Its processes are designed to ensure all pricing is competitive, is from an approved supplier, and is ordered and delivered correctly. These measures are in place to ensure internal operations related to ASG’s supply chain are running efficiently and effectively and that it is delivering profit and value back to the organisation.

Following the introduction of the Business Management Office (BMO) at ASG in 2018, a project to establish a national Procurement model that would strengthen and unify all Procurement related areas was borne. The new national model would provide a centralised hub for all purchasing activity moving forward and would replace the legacy structures and processes that had been carried over following a large acquisition in 2017.

The success of the project has enabled ASG to move away from a manual to a formal and system-based approach to purchasing IT products, consumables, and related services, to a standardised, automated, end to end approach with stringent governance in place for vetting new suppliers. These changes were designed to solve a number of recurring issues and inefficiencies in the procurement process that were contributing to revenue losses, delivery errors and delays, and internal and external stakeholder frustrations.

Along with a national governance structure and controls, a key goal was to provide a portal with live feeds to supplier catalogues; the ability to generate and send quotes online via the cloud; autogenerate Purchase Orders; and setup custom price rules for customers to protect margins. Additional functionality for report generation and dashboards was built into the project deliverables to allow for improved business analysis.

The project was successfully completed in March 2022. It leveraged the internal expertise of 9 internal resources which included Senior Managers who provided strategic direction and deliverables for the initiative, and Oracle functional and technical expertise from a dedicated SME.

ASG used a Project Management Methodology (PMM) that incorporated the framework and processes of the Project Management Institutes (PMI) Project Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and concepts from the UK Government’s Prince2 methodology.

The new solution has transformed a once laborious, inconsistent, and unreliable process into a streamlined and uniformed function that delivers efficiencies and greater business value to ASG through insights and best practice governance. Today, the time taken to process Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) has reduced by 60%; any time spent changing supplier quotes due to pricing errors has been completely removed; time spent reconciling incorrect orders has reduced by half; costs associated with reversing incorrect orders has reduced by 50-60%; costs associated with redelivery of incorrect orders has been reduced by over 80%; and consistent sales margin has been enforced on all orders.

Since the rollout, user feedback has been extremely positive with stakeholders commenting that the new process is now effortless, simple, professional and user friendly.

Following the success, ASG plans to provide the self-serve portal as an additional value-add service to its customers, further elevating ASG’s position as a leading IT supplier.

For more information about ASG Group, visit asggroup.com.au