Supply Chain Management

Through our experience and constant review of methods and systems, we have developed robust procedures to ensure that our aims are achieved in response to the needs of our projects and clients worldwide.

One of our objectives is to recognise suppliers and partners and to promote suitably approved suppliers to key supplier or partner status. This process is designed to develop and/or strengthen long-term collaborative relationships and to recognise best practice, market leaders and progressive, innovative members of the supply chain. It is also consistent with our policy to reduce our supply chain by objective selection. The benefits from our processes are as follows:

• Drives continuous improvement in the supply chain
• Certainty of supply and prices
• Reduced costs
• Certainty of programme
• Closer working relationship, transparency of process, ownership of issues
• Aligned cultures mitigating risks

Best practice is driven and achieved by utilising subcontractor/suppliers KPIs to assess performance, set improvement targets and improve performance. Supplier efficiency can be benchmarked for performance measurement.

Costing can be established based on supply arrangements using traditional procurement methods. However, smarter solutions including supply arrangements based on the provision of a “managed service” - whereby the supplier has to consider the life cycle cost of the equipment that they are supplying - can result in efficiencies being made.

To ensure their buy-in to the concepts of value management the key players within the supply chain must be incentivised by, for example:

• Key subcontract agreements modelled upon similar reward mechanism as the main contract. The subcontractor then becomes more involved in the process which is performance driven.
• Alternative payment mechanisms can be introduced in return for better value service.