H&Z Management Consulting - Consulting with head, heart and hand

Revolutionizing Procurement for the Future

In leading organisations, procurement is a pivotal function driving success. With bought-in goods and services constituting up to 70% of an organisation's costs, optimizing procurement is essential. A refined procurement strategy directly boosts EBIT.

 

However, it isn’t straightforward. Companies increasingly rely on external suppliers for more and more business-critical services whilst supply-chains are complex and span the globe. The challenge is to optimise costs whilst taking environmental, social and governance standards to the next level. ​Procurement Excellence is the key lever for profitability, value creation and sustainability. It’s time to rethink procurement.

Cargo ship at sea

Elevating Procurement’s Impact in Modern Business: The New Purpose of Procurement

As the significance of procurement grows, it demands transformative changes. Beyond just managing costs, there's a need to proactively innovate, adapt to the environment, and embrace digital solutions. Suppliers are becoming partners, cost awareness is complemented by value generation, whilst supply chain resilience and sustainability become the driving forces. ​Procurement must reinvent itself. Breaking out of the old world. Taking on more responsibility, orchestrating the key processes, and offering sustainable solutions. With suppliers as partners and a shared vision for the big global issues.​

 

With over 25 years of legacy, H&Z stands as a frontrunner in procurement. Our seasoned team is adept at navigating the contemporary challenges organizations encounter. We are committed to shape the future and new purpose of procurement, empowering our clients to unlock their full potential and achieve remarkable results.

These are our Procurement Awards

Procurement Pathfinder 2024

Read The Procurement Pathfinder 2024 and discover how H&Z can support your procurement transformation. Our expertise and innovative approaches are designed to help you deliver procurement excellence and drive sustainable growth.

 

Produced in partnership with The Procurement Initiative and the University of St. Gallen, the Pathfinder is designed to be your strategic guide to the multiple trends shaping modern procurement and an essential compass for navigating an increasingly complex space.

 

Delve into this essential resource and learn how H&Z can help you transform your procurement practices. With our deep expertise and forward-thinking strategies, we are committed to helping you achieve procurement excellence.

Our Comprehensive Procurement Services

H&Z

Procurement Value Creation

Through a detailed 360° analysis, we assist clients in enhancing their procurement strategies, focusing on cost reduction and maximizing value across all direct and indirect spend categories. Our team of experienced procurement experts leverage 25 years of experience, deep supply market knowledge and specialist data analytic tools and approaches to thoroughly analyse spend, suppliers, commodity groups and products. We then craft bespoke value creation plans to identify short-term, medium-term, and long-term opportunities and work in partnership with our clients to deliver the benefits to the bottom-line.​

Rapid Impact Cost Reduction​

 

In high-pressure margin recovery situations, it is essential to generate immediate bottom-line results. Our rapid impact approach prioritizes existing suppliers and contracts; using cost analysis, benchmarking and historical linear performance pricing techniques to drive negotiations. Our experts team up with clients to deliver swift benefits realization.​

 

  • Our Quick Win Opportunity Assessment rapidly scopes the potential, identifies immediate targets and defines the execution roadmap​
     
  • Our unique H&Z Supplier Day approach provides a highly effective and programmatic management of multiple, comprehensive and structured negotiations. Our negotiation experts support every negotiation, from start to finish, ensuring quick commercial reset and recovery of historical benefit.
     
  • In cash critical situations, our Sourcing Award and PO Control Tower management ensures precise control and leverage of every euro, pound or dollar. ​
     

Strategic Procurement Value Enhancement: Lasting Impact and Results​

Our comprehensive cost-out/value creation projects are driven by a Value Creation Plan (VCP) that defines a roadmap of supplier, sourcing and contract activity as well as category, commodity and product group strategies and specific optimization projects. Developing the Value Creation Plan with business stakeholders builds the required cross-functional collaboration for sustainable implementation. 
 

  • ​We accurately benchmark commodity and category maturity, providing a clear baseline of current strategies, activities and plans
     
  • ​Our Lever Workshops utilize H&Z’s proprietary 360° bullseye strategy methodology brings together cross-functional teams to identify and quantify every possible potential​
     

Drawing on our extensive expertise across direct & indirect commodity groups, we guide companies in creating and executing their Value Creation Plans. This encompasses initial data analysis of procurement volume, cross-functional leverage workshops, identification of alternative suppliers, strategic sourcing and commercial negotiations based on a coordinated strategy. ​Throughout this process, our professional project management, control tower, and purpose-built software solutions ensure seamless implementation.​

 

Cost & Value Engineering (CVE) - Unleashing cross-functional cost reduction and product optimization​ 

Our cutting-edge Cost & Value Engineering (CVE) methodology gets to the core of product costs; analysing components and materials in order to reduce cost whilst maintaining quality, and identifying ways to enhance value while reducing cost.​Product tear-down, competitor benchmarking, raw material cost analysis and physical reverse engineering techniques help scrutinize each individual component from a functional, commercial, and technical perspective. ​Cost & Value Engineering delivers step-change cost reduction and value creation, as well as a structured way to re-engineer high risk and supply bottlenecks.​

Many winding highways from Bird view

Procurement Transformation

Globalization, sustainability, and digitalization are reshaping the world of procurement. On top of that, factors like growth, corporate acquisitions, or mergers can trigger the need to realign procurement functions. We help clients achieve Procurement Excellence.

World Class Procurement Assessment – benchmarking excellence​ 

Our World Class Procurement Assessment provides a 360° picture of the procurement organization, identifying pain-points whilst accurately benchmarking performance. Combining our on-line tool with 1:1 discussions, with not just procurement stakeholders but key organizational interfaces and business partners, we provide a clear view across competencies, processes and performance levels.​Based on more than 25 year’s experience , our on-line database benchmarks against over 1000+ procurement organizations across all sectors. The World Class Procurement Assessment highlights both strengths and weaknesses and the gap to procurement excellence. 

 

Crafting the Future: Your Procurement Transformation Blueprint 

Working closely with the business, we jointly develop the Procurement Transformation Roadmap; defining the targets, deliverables and actions needed to create a function that is fit for the future across strategy, organization set-up, processes, systems, data, tools, governance, people and skills. ​"Guiding the alignment of the procurement operating model with overarching business goals, the Target Operating Model approach also ensures the ideal functional size and configuration, considering personnel, expertise, and systems.

 

Support for every step on the road to Procurement Excellence​ 

Our expert procurement consultants can hand-hold every step on the road to procurement excellence, providing the tools, methods, training and hands-on change consulting, working closely with both procurement and business stakeholders. We create bespoke support programs to work closely with existing teams.  

Freight train on rails bird view

Responsible Procurement​

At H&Z, we recognize procurement as more than just cost optimization; it's a catalyst for transformative change in promoting sustainable and responsible global supply chains. In today's business landscape, driven by demands from consumers, investors, and stakeholders, along with an increasing legislative push, sustainability has become paramount. Yet, with scope 3 emissions constituting up to 75% of a company's greenhouse gas emissions, many organizations lack robust plans to achieve net-zero targets. We envision a revamped role for procurement, aligning it with sustainability aspirations. We champion this as "Responsible Procurement", empowering procurement divisions to not only contribute to business viability but also champion societal well-being and planetary health.​

"Responsible Procurement" at H&Z transforms how organizations approach sustainability in their procurement strategies. Our holistic offering includes:​​

 

Embedding Sustainability: Our core belief is that procurement goes beyond mere cost optimization. By embedding sustainability into the procurement operating model, we ensure it remains a foundational consideration across all procurement activities.

 

​​Maturity Assessment & Benchmarking: By assessing your current sustainability maturity, we pinpoint areas of focus. Through materiality analysis, we highlight the most critical “sustainability hotspots”, helping you achieve maximum sustainability impact.​​

 

Purpose Definition and Strategy Crafting: Initiating your journey with a clear purpose, we help articulate a commitment that guides all procurement endeavors. By merging this with our robust strategies, we balance value creation, resilience, and sustainability.​​

 

Category Management: Tailored sustainability strategies are formulated for each sourcing category, making sure your procurement processes align with your sustainability ethos.​​

 

Supplier Management: We integrate sustainability criteria throughout the supplier management journey - from onboarding and continuous evaluations to rigorous audits.​​

 

Selection & Awarding: Sustainability isn't just an added bonus—it's a decisive criterion. With our guidance, it takes center stage in vendor selection and awarding processes.​​

 

Collaborative Supplier Networks: We don't just stop at in-house processes. We assist in forging collaborative networks with suppliers, focusing on creating efficient recycling infrastructures and pinpointing solutions to significantly cut down scope 3 emissions.​​

 

Beyond being a mere concept, 'Responsible Procurement' signifies a transformative movement. Collaboratively, we have the potential to evolve your procurement strategies into a beacon of sustainability and impactful change..​

H&Z

Procurement Digitalization

Technology is transforming procurement. Digitalization enhances efficiency and transparency, streamlines administrative tasks through automation, enhances sourcing impact, enables effective supplier and contract management and facilitates informed decision-making with advanced analytics.​

Delivering the benefits of digital procurement​

To truly leverage the power of digital procurement, processes and operating models must be comprehensively prepared and optimized. We work to prepare the organization for change, ensuring best-practice operations and streamlined processes, ready for digital implementation and managing the organization through every step of the change process.

 

Procurement solution specification and selection

​Based on our in-depth knowledge of the procurement software and solutions market, we employ design thinking and agile methods to define the precise requirements for potential software solutions. Our comprehensive approach considers both the procurement and IT perspectives.​In the selection phase, our selection support process follows a 360° logic, ensuring an unbiased and neutral system selection. We provide full support during the tendering process, including contract negotiations with the chosen software provider, to help you achieve maximum impact for lowest cost. ​

 

Comprehensive procurement technology implementation​

Working hand in hand with our implementation specialist subsidiary, aneon, to manage, guide and hands-on implement throughout the complete software implementation process. We offer both traditional and agile implementation methods. As H&Z, we take on the role of a challenger, striving to optimize processes and commodity groups before technology is implemented. This proactive approach ensures that your digital transformation journey yields the best possible outcomes.​

Our Success Stories for Procurement

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The Procurement Initiative

We founded The Procurement Initiative, to bring together the leading procurement thinkers from business, academia and management consulting, to find fresh answers to the most significant challenges in procurement.​ 

Our Experts for Procurement

Ralf Schulz

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Ralf Schulz

Harald Enz

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Harald Enz - Experte für Einkaufsthemen bei H&Z

Richard McIntosh

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Richard Mcintosh

Brendan McVeigh

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Brendan McVeigh