SUPPLY CHAIN lie dormant for ten years or more before replacements are needed .
Schulties and his colleagues in the global procurement team are therefore driving change in the strategy , however , as he says frequently : “ If you can ’ t see it ( spend visibility ) you don ’ t know what you are dealing with .” Visibility was the lacking component , where it was possible , for example , that the same product was categorized or named differently by different plants . With a large number of suppliers in the IT space , he and his team went through
a process of assessment before forming a partnership with a third party vendor to adopt a tool that is already making great improvements in spend management . After just three months he can foresee that this investment will pay for itself in a very short time , with massive benefits when applied globally . “ Frankly our procurement IT platform for spend visibility was not really adequate , but now we can say with some certainty that it is better than anything we could have done with internal tools available to us currently .”