Manuel Meister, Managing Director, and Jürg Hodel, Principal Director at Accenture Switzerland, explain how the organisation’s 3600 partnership with SBB has helped enhance its procurement transformation journey…
Over the last five years the role of CPO has changed significantly, moving from a focus on price, to adding organisational value. For Jürg Hodel, SC&O Expert and Project Lead WCM (World Class Manufacturing), Principal Director, Accenture Switzerland, two issues have driven this change. “Sustainable, long-term collaborations with suppliers build resilience in terms of supply and quality, as well as stable pricing. Alongside this, procurement needs to act as an internal business consultant to become a value-added service within the company.”
Manuel Meister, Client Account Lead SBB, Managing Director, Accenture Switzerland adds, “For a long time procurement focused on bringing prices down, but now people come to us at an earlier point asking what Accenture can do for them in addition to IT. So, it’s more strategic and long-term, which has been an important element of our relationship with SBB.”
Hodel sees more focus on the total cost of ownership today as well. This is especially important at SBB with the long life cycle of its assets, requiring a careful balance between price and a resilient, stable supply chain.
Meister says, “Resilience is important. Things change quickly, so what might look like a great deal, isn’t two weeks later. Having the flexibility, foresight and capability to adjust and be resilient is, for me, one of the key pressure points for a CPO today.”
SBB has strong internal expertise across the board, so Accenture’s role wasn’t to replace it, but to enhance it through collaboration. SBB brings knowledge of its business and Accenture brings its experience from other industries.
“Bringing in cross-industry expertise really gets things moving,” says Meister. “We’ve been working with SBB across technology, operations and transformation, which has created trust on both sides, providing context for the industry, for the challenges they face and the ambition they have. So, we bring value through extra capacity and knowledge, but SBB trusts us to challenge them as well. We have proven methods and assets to connect businesses and technology, which I think is the core.”
The development and evolution of AI has been dramatic and Accenture has deployed AI in a number of ways with SBB. “The first key project we did with SBB was the transformation of their commodity key,” Hodel notes. “In the past they had five different commodity keys in five different systems, ERP systems and surrounding applications. We carried out AI-based data mining, data compilation and structural mapping to the new key, ready for migration in one HANA platform. This helped map roughly 750,000 data sets and 350 contracts with several positions, which helped reduce the time it took by around 90% over a manual process.”
“We’re also looking at working capital management using agentic AI to do data analytics and combining it with their processes. Process agents are supporting the SBB people and us to find out where the biggest potential for cost-savings are, and to see if we can leverage suppliers to get a better service in terms of supply and reduce working capital and stock levels.”
Accenture was an early investor in AI, even when some questioned its impact. As well as introducing new technology, its collaborative model allows them to support organisational transformation, enabling them to take the fear out of new technology, allowing people to use AI to perform its daily work better, with a clear career path in this new environment.
“Transformations often fall somewhere in the handover between strategy and execution,” according to Meister. “I think our strength at Accenture is that we can connect these layers. We can build the required technology and the data foundation. We can support the execution to any scale needed onshore, nearshore, offshore and utilise feedback to optimise it over time. Having an end-to-end view really matters for supply chain, so Accenture’s power becomes visible, because we connect these different layers and bring everything together.”
In the past the application landscape for procurement was relatively small, but nowadays, procurement is integrated as part of the end-to-end supply chain. Accenture provides a holistic approach from strategy and management consulting, to having the capability and expertise to build the solution and providing support with implementation, execution and operation. Accenture has also widened its remit through the acquisition of companies like Staufen AG, complementing its existing strengths with areas like supply chain operations.
With many companies looking to introduce agentic AI into their ecosystem, SBB have already made steps in that direction. Accenture carefully monitors procurement organisations to see who the early adopters are. “The fast movers gain dramatically in terms of efficiency, quality and reducing internal lead time for their customers,” observes Hodel. “The key is considering how to use agentic AI in collaboration with people. This is the thing many procurement organisations are still struggling with.”
Meister believes agentic AI is at a tipping point, moving from a position where organisations have enough faith in AI to assist them, to trusting it enough to take action. The next step will be scaling, which will require governance that goes beyond most company’s current capacity. Systems have to be auditable, with escalation logic if something goes wrong and this is what Meister sees as being the next major challenge.
While some consultancies focus on strategy, others concentrate on integrating systems. Accenture’s 3600 value creation approach delivers both though, meaning they can provide a full suite of solutions from strategy, through to implementation, governance and more.
Find out more about Accenture here.