As McCain has grown, it’s grown as a decentralized organization. And so we started to ask ourselves, “Are we leveraging our global scale and do we have the best practices and policies in place?” As we started to answer that question, we decided that we had some opportunity in this area. We started to look at a project called ‘Project Mercury’, which was to save $60 million over three years. In doing that, we decided we need external help and expertise; someone who had the global reach and the expertise to get the best policies and practices in place.

First and foremost, the reason for selecting GEP (formerly Global eProcure) is around people. People are important. McCain is a privately held company and has a very distinct culture and as we started the selection process and looked at a number of different providers, it quickly became apparent to me that GEP (formerly Global eProcure) also shared the same core values and interest in people. Beyond that we also needed someone who could have the global scale, the global reach and the expertise to take on such a large scale initiative and ultimately we felt GEP (formerly Global eProcure) was the best partner.

This program has delivered very good value for McCain. We’ve clearly met the first year target and we are halfway through year two and on plan, very much on plan. We are very happy and excited about the results from a dollar perspective. I would also say we are better leveraging our global scale as a result of this initiative and also building those best practices and putting those policies and procedures in place for good governance and sustainability, the savings over the long-term.

Saint- Gobain is a French company with their headquarters in Paris, France. It’s a manufacturing company and we’re approximately about 44 billion Euros in turnover. We have a good presence in North America. There are over 300 facilities; a mix of manufacturing and distribution, about 22,000 employees and we have grown quite a bit through acquisition. That is what brought us to North America and it’s quite a diverse group. In North America, building materials is a big part of Saint-Gobain, but worldwide we offer construction products, packaging, high performance materials and distribution.

As we are diversified by so many acquisitions and so many different legacy systems, we really decided to start looking to do outsourcing and try to consolidate and leverage our spend. We worked with some other consulting companies and when finally connected with GEP (formerly Global eProcure), we found them to be the best partner for us, the most balance that we could find that fit our model and we’ve been together for seven years. We have had great results. We have a good relationship because we have a good mix of cultural differential; they bring some good talent, good P2P, technology, and the mix that we have works very well. We’ve developed into a pretty unique partnership. We are in for the long haul because outsourcing and effective procurement requires good support and for an organization of our size, we use a lot of different techniques.

We’ve settled in on sort of a hybrid results, where it’s GEP (formerly Global eProcure) and our different businesses. We have category managers, who have key stakeholders and expertise in commodities, and they team up with a select group from GEP (formerly Global eProcure). With GEP (formerly Global eProcure), you have some very talented people that come from very different disciplines and we can mix and match and get some very good results. We get very good consulting services and their suite of technology is very beneficial. We can pick and choose when to use it depending upon the market dynamics - both internal and external. We found a good solution, we have been very successful and we don’t see the need to change anything.

I am Alain Concher, Vice President of Procurement at L'Oréal U.S.A. I am an old-timer with L’Oreal. Almost 40 years of my career has been to run subsidiaries or brands. It’s only the last seven years ago that the CEO at the time asked me to start an indirect procurement function. We had direct (procurement) but not indirect (procurement). L’Oreal worldwide has a turnover of over $22 billion and we do $5 billion in the U.S.

We have been working with GEP (formerly Global eProcure) for seven years. It started as a technical assistant for reverse auctions and it moved into food procurement service, more strategic development. We are now with five different waves that we call schemes; scheme 1-5. We like to work with GEP (formerly Global eProcure) because in addition to their normal functionality and technicality, their consultants have exceptional interpersonal skills. They relate very well with the stakeholders of the different categories that we study and this feature I have not seen with other companies. Also, GEP (formerly Global eProcure) has the advantage of a very powerful back office in India. They can therefore go more in-depth in the analysis of the categories and also they have their own suite of tools, so it’s sort of an all-in-one stop shop for procurement assistance.

I can certainly recommend whole-heartedly GEP (formerly Global eProcure) to other companies. If I can try to summarize why we like to work with GEP (formerly Global eProcure), it’s because they have very collaborative culture in addition to their impeccable technical skills. They are very result-oriented, they are much focused, and they provide for us a very good Return on Investment (ROI).