Lean Process Improvement (LPI) implementation for the department of Indirect Procurement of a home appliances multinational company

The department of indirect procurement of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia (EMEA) division of a multinational company X in the home appliance sector is seeking to improve its processes for the purchase of materials and the contracting of services. The Indirect Procurement (IP) field is divided into different categories such as Marketing, Supply Chain, Travel, IT, MRO, Finance, HR, among others. Each category has a manager and a group of buyers in charge of all the execution of the purchasing process. The Lean Process Improvement methodology was used during the current project with the deployment of tools such as the SIPOC matrix, impact table, maturity table, flow diagram among others to find a way of adding value to the indirect procurement process. Also, the IP manager requested to evaluate the possibility of creating a “Procurement center” as has been done before in the main region of the company, where a team has been created in order to provide integration of both the strategic and operational sections of procurement, giving support to process partners and category leads of the end-to-end procurement process, helping solve problems with general directions, supporting strategic commodities including the development of relationships with suppliers and process partners and maintaining an understanding of contract law, negotiations, industry/supplier analysis, supplier quality, and strategy formulation. At the end of the project, the main goal is to improve the IP team processes by implementing all the tools mentioned before and considering whether or not creating a Procurement center for the IP team would be a good option or if standardizing some processes internally is enough to improve the whole indirect procurement process.