I have presented in the post SSOA III/IV how to prioritize SGs, depending on 1) the potential savings they could generate and 2) their easiness of implementation. The next and last phase is to define the implementation plan of your Strategic Sourcing program. There’s no obligation at all to translate your excel spreadsheet with SGs /Savings/Ease of implementation into a graph, but it helps to define sourcing-waves and when comes the time to communicate. So here is an sample of what you could do to make your priorities clear to everyone.
Aside from the savings/easiness matrix and in order to plan appropriatly your Strategic Sourcing program, you have to take a couple of additional constraints into account:
- Current Contracts: check the termination terms of all your current contracts in place and related to your sourcing groups. Analyse contract clauses and find-out when the earliest you can have a new contract in place with each of your sourcing groups. This will tell you when the earliest it makes sense to start working on a SG.
- Resources: The number of SGs you can manage by wave (during a same period) is related to the number of resource you have available. There is not a magic formula to calculate what you need, but I underlined below a couple of interesting overall-general-dimensions.
- Quick wins: as in any project which induct change management, you have not to forget to realise wins quickly in the wave-priority-1 even if savings are small. It will confirms to everyone you are in the good direction and will take energy out from scepticals.
Speed SSOA TIPS:
- 1 FTE can in general manage 1 to 3 SGs, with the support of appropriate cross-functional and multi-disciplinary team.
- 1 SG need in general between 4 to 9 months to be treated
From there, you will sort-out and qualify each of your SGs with following criteria:
- wave priority
- Savings
- Start date – end date
- Resource responsible
As you can imagine (maybe!) depending what your constraints are (i.e. current contract termination clauses and resource-limitations) you will have to reshuffle SGs in different wave-priorities so to get a realistic, matching-all-constraints and balanced sourcing-wave-program.There you are. Your high-level Strategic Sourcing program is ready and your SSOA is completed.