Global Insider 02/2010 - Seco-Warwick

2/2010
THEY ARE NOT MEMBERS OF ANY SUPERVISORY BOARDS
Nie They are not members of any
Supervisory Boards, they do not occupy leading
positions in organizational structures. They
certainly do not posses such technical
knowledge as designers and do not know
markets and customers as good as sales people
do. Yet, it is their involvement, negotiation skills
and will to fight that substantially influence
prices of equipment we offer on worlds markets,
which is directly related to our competitiveness
and financial results of the organization.
Purchasing departments - this is who we
have in mind here - are teams in our companies
composed of just a few people, whose main
task is to purchase materials at sufficiently low
prices within short periods of time. It might
seem like a piece of cake, however, it is a
never-ending maze, where new possibilities,
new purchasing markets, new conditions, new
suppliers as well as new problems, tasks and
challenges, etc. appear on every path.
We often do not realize that purchasing
departments within individual companies of the
Seco/Warwick Group manage tens of million
zlotys per year.
If we added up the value of purchased
materials and cooperation services in the whole
Seco/Warwick Group in 2009, which for many
companies was not the year of optimal sale and
revenue, we would up with a huge amount of
56 million USD. This means that last year our
purchasing departments managed a portfolio
worth 56 million.
In view of such enormous amounts of
money, great opportunities have appeared for
optimizing materials expenditures in purchasing
departments. For many years of our activity
SECO/WARWICK GROUP PURCHASING DEPARTMENTS
SWSA
Currently, there are 5 people working in the
SECO/WARWICK S.A. purchasing department.
employees of these departments have
learned how to buy at low prices, how
to negotiate successfully and how to
properly organize logistic service. For
many years our purchasing departments
operated separately and independently.
The first integration of SW SA and
Elterma purchasing departments took
place only a year ago. From a time
perspective and many years of
experience we can say today that the
work put into joint activities within
purchasing and logistic of Elterma and
SW SA have brought significant savings.
Based on this experience and the
mandate to improve our global procurement
efficiency, the Global Purchasing Team was
established a few months ago. The team's
activity includes all purchasing departments of
the Seco/Warwick Group and the members are:
Kathleen Goss from Retech Systems LLC
Steve Balombini from SWC
Anna WoŸniak from SWR
Janusz Strzelecki from Elterma
Anna Wróblewska fromSW SA
S³awomir Wachowski from SW SA
Katarzyna Kowalska from SW SA
The main GPT tasks include cuting prices of
materials in the whole Group, purchase
co-ordination, acquisition of new suppliers
and making the most of purchasing potential in
the whole Seco/Warwick Group.
The first meeting of planned GPT meetings
series took place in June 2010 and
representatives of all purchasing departments
Economic crisis from the last year caused
employment decrease in our department, but
we still have a lot of work. During the last 3
years, we have placed 11700 orders with our
suppliers. As it lies in a woman's nature, we
spent substantial financial resources, but not
without tough negotiations. With the purchase
level more than 11 million USD per year, we
are saving around 1,7% of all expenditures.
Annually, we participate in around 100
business meetings with our most important
suppliers, during which we negotiate business
conditions and make every effort to secure
adequate prices for materials used in the
production of our furnaces. We take advantage
of technological trainings offered by
manufacturers and our designers as it is the best
and the cheapest way to acquire more technical
were present. The purpose of the meeting, apart
from establishing friendly relations, was to set
strategy and operation plan for the next few
months. Main points include:
1. Savings of 1,5 million USD by the end of
2011
2. Expansion of co-operation on local suppliers
markets
3. Identification of Chinese market in terms of
new, high quality and cheap materials
4. Serial meetings, conference calls during
which experiences and information will be
exchanged, assignments will be reported and
the operation plan will be updated and
extended.
Due to varied locations of our companies,
cultural differences, dissimilarities resulting from
diversity of local suppliers markets, these
assignments will not be easy, nevertheless,
taking into account the benefits we can
achieve, they are worth our joint effort.
Katarzyna Kowalska,
Organization & HR Director, SWSA
knowledge.
Our small team is one of the fastest-growing
in the company: during the last 4 years 3 babies
were born in our families: Miko³aj, Marcel and
Micha³ (all of them are boys - the balance must
be maintained).
This year we plan to put an increased
emphasis on the information exchange and
cooperation with the other purchasing
departments within the SECO/WARWICK group.
The potential here is huge. Until now we
mainly worked with our closest neighbor -
Elterma, but we will extend our contacts with
our US based companies and those operating in
the Asian markets. We have high hopes,
especially in terms of cooperation with our new
venture in China - SWR company.
Poland • USA • China • India • Russia
9