MERCK KGAA, DARMSTADT, GERMANY
– one that often comes from within procurement itself.“ I don’ t think C-suites need to be convinced of the importance of procurement, I think we need to become convinced about the actual value we bring,” he argues.
His point is that procurement often underplays its role. The language used in the sector shows it:“ We talk about our internal customers, but they’ re not our customers. They’ re our colleagues,” he says.“ There’ s this inferiority complex that we need to overcome.”
The pandemic, he points out, showed procurement’ s value.“ During COVID we managed to get a seat at the table … we were top of the agenda.” The trick to sustaining that level of visibility, he says, requires boldness and innovation.“ If you don’ t have raw materials, there’ s nothing that you can produce. If you cannot produce anything, there’ s nothing that you can sell. So you could argue that procurement is one of the key first steps into your entire value chain.”
Procurement, in his view, must become comfortable with constant movement.“ We need to disrupt ourselves … We need to fail, test, reiterate, adjust and really come into a state of continuous evolution.”
Technology is central to this shift. The pace of change is rapid and procurement has to keep up.“ What is today might not be tomorrow,” Sebastien warns.
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that transformation. The aim of these solutions isn’ t to replace procurement teams, but rather to help it shift focus to value-added activities.
One of Merck’ s partnerships is with WNS, aimed squarely at managing tail spend. Tail spend refers to the long tail of small, often unmanaged purchases that don’ t typically receive strategic attention. It’ s complex, resourceintensive, but full of untapped potential.
“ I would describe us as still on the journey together,” Sebastien says.“ We all recognised a couple of years back the importance of managing tail spend … but also the complexity that it had to tackle.”
“ WNS has been instrumental in starting to tap into these areas and starting to unlock the value of an area which before was very hard and complex to manage for us internally.”
Merck began working with WNS in targeted regions to see how its expertise could unlock value from these overlooked areas. It provides comprehensive procurement solutions through a blend of managed services and digital transformation tools, focusing on strategic impact and modernisation.
12 merckgroup. com