Purchasing control fills even the largest event venues! We experienced this firsthand at the 51st BME Symposium on Purchasing and Logistics at the InterContinental Hotel in Berlin. Under the motto “Agenda 2030: Agile and Connected,” the German Association for Materials Management, Purchasing, and Logistics (BME) hosted informative specialist conferences, exciting morning specials, intensive workshops, creative innovation forums, and lively roundtable discussions from November 9 to 11, 2016. Of the 2,000 participants, most were interested in the purchasing control conference in the largest event room – and thus ensured that the seats were filled to capacity. A particular highlight was the presentation by Michael Asenkerschbaumer, Director Strategy/Projects/Controlling, Freudenberg Sealing Technologies GmbH & Co. KG, entitled “Planning, measuring & communicating purchasing results.” He showed how an efficient purchasing controlling process can strengthen strategic purchasing in the long term:
- Setting the course for success: planning operational purchasing performance
- Change process: the path to measurable purchasing results
- Outlook, stumbling blocks, and lessons learned
The topics at the SoftconCIS booth also sparked lively discussions among purchasing professionals. The “purchasing perspective on the future” – planning hard figures and measures combined with seamless documentation and effective plan/actual comparisons – met with particular interest. It was also clear to our prospective customers that dashboards remain a must in purchasing, as does spend management with a savings tracker. The SoftconCIS savings tracker generates suggestions for improvement from purchasing data and automatically displays potential savings. It thus meets the typical purchasing requirement of achieving savings quickly and sustainably.
