How TotalEnergies leverages Bid Analytics for faster and better Sourcing Decisions

Summary

TotalEnergies is a company that is transforming to provide sustainable solutions for people and the environment. The company identified the need to centralize procurement to support its digitlisation and sustainability ambitions. The company identified 30 use cases and focused on eight that addressed the key stakeholder pain points best. TotalEnergies chose Archlet, as the solution provider for ‘Bid Analytics’ in the area of smart sourcing & tender negotiation. Archlet is a Sourcing Analytics Platform, with the goal to empower sourcing managers to make better decisions faster to increase efficiency, savings and professionalism during bid analysis and supplier negotiation. Archlet can be used as a bid analytics add-on to your existing e-Sourcing system (e.g. SAP Ariba) or as a stand-alone Sourcing Software supporting the end-to-end source-to-award process.

The Background

With over 20 years of experience in finance, marketing and procurement under her belt, Isabelle Guer has seen and actively contributed to the ongoing transformation at TotalEnergies. In her words, TotalEnergies is transforming ​to provide tangible, sustainable solutions ​to address the dual challenge of more energy with less emissions.​

Respect for each other and the environment has inspired the company to develop their sustainability strategy based on 4 pillars:

1. Sustainable energy and climate
2. People’s well-being
3. Care for the environment
4. Creating shared value with stakeholders

With these pillars in mind, the company needed to transform and decided to centralize TotalEnergies’ procurement to support its sustainability ambitions.

The Challenge

In 2017, TotalEnergies embarked on a transformation journey to enhance its management of supplier relationships and provide better assistance to its entities. Fast forward to 2020, and the company had set its sights on a more ambitious goal: supporting its transformation towards a more sustainable future. This involved the digitalization of its supply chain, a process that began with a flurry of brainstorming sessions and idea-generation from various levels of the company, including managers, users, and customers. Like most businesses, TotalEnergies were only at the beginning of their procurement transformation journey and stuck between Maturity Level 1 and Level 2:

To advance its maturity level, TotalEnergies identified 30 use cases, each with its own potential benefits. However, the company knew it needed to prioritize, so it focused on the eight use cases that would provide the most immediate value and engagement for users. In the use case ‘Bid Analysis during RFQs’ the pain points identified by the company's stakeholders included:

• High quantity of data during RFQs, driven by No. of line items / SKUs and participating suppliers
• Complex cost breakdowns
• Limited capability of creating scenario simulations due to error-prone Excel work
• Not enough time to prepare detailed/impactful feedback during supplier negotiations

Using these pain points as a foundation, Total Energies set out to find a solution that would make life of the buyers easier in complex and large RFQs with the goal to empower the team to make better decisions faster. It also wanted a tool with advanced and interactive analytics capabilities, to help the company gain the insights it needed to become more sustainable during RFQ decisions. With these requirements in mind, Total Energies set its sights on a bright digital future, where it could better manage supplier relationships, make data-driven decisions, and become a leader in sustainability.

The Solution

TotalEnergies had trouble moving from level two to level three due to the lack of a suitable bid analytics solution, which made it difficult to make supplier comparisons and run scenarios quickly without the assistance of an IT person.

They even considered creating an in-house solution but instead decided to look for companies that could provide a solution to their specific pain points. Archlet was selected as the solution provider after they demonstrated their capabilities using data from a previous call for tender.

TotalEnergies chose and uses Archlet for the following reasons:

• Archlet's bid analytics solution is smart and easy to use
• The support received from the Archlet team in change management helps to increase adoption
• Archlet can guide even less experienced buyers through its predefined process and supports in the execution of the sourcing strategy
• As soon as buyers understand how to use Archlet, they want to do more analyses with it and use Archlet more frequently
• Archlet allows the purchasing team to produce innovative ideas and strategies to meet their sustainability goals thanks to easy scenario creation and allocation optimization

To achieve results quickly, TotalEnergies decided to focus on specific categories that were characterized by several complexity drivers, such as many items and suppliers, additional decision criteria, multiple currencies, and capacity constraints:

The Results

One year in, the results speak for themselves. With Archlet, TotalEnergies Global Procurement (TGP) was able to

1. Build up professionalism of buyers by (1) elevating relationships with internal and external stakeholders, (2) developing strategic competencies, (3) raising awareness on data management.
2. Enhance global results and performance in sourcing phase by (1) demonstrating purchasing expertise, (2) identifying additional financial savings (2-5%) due to more negotiation rounds and data-based supplier feedback.
3. Reduce sourcing cycle time by (1) making use of technology backed data consolidation, (2) analysis and optimization, (3) making time for strategic tasks such as internal stakeholder management and supplier negotiation preparation.
   

The category managers and buyers in the team echo Isabelle’s sentiment (see quotes below) and some even provided suppliers with Archlet-generated feedback and sneak peeks into Archlet dashboards to co-develop certain functionalities.

The Future

TotalEnergies continues to use Archlet for more categories and has leveraged Archlet’s best practices to create quick and easy to use bid sheet templates. Technology-backed sourcing allows the procurement team at TotalEnergies to focus on the most strategic aspects of their jobs such as stakeholder, management, and supplier relationships and to achieve their transformation goals. Both TotalEnergies and Archlet are really looking forward to expanding their relationship and to having even more success stories and learnings to share in a year from now.

Would you also like to see selected bid sheet templates to improve your sourcing efficiency and standardize processes? Have a look at our public Bid sheet library found in our guide for best-in-class bid sheet guide. Interested in finding out how Archlet can support you and help you make the leap from Level 1 or 2? Book a demo and talk to our team.

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