Purchasing Transformation

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ran a piece titled “Siemens trennt sich von 74.000 Lieferanten” where Siemens Head of Supply Chain Management (and Chief Sustainability Officer) Barbera Kux really spoke out about Siemens spend and what she’s got planned for the next few years (big kudos to German journalistic traditions for going so deep).

Once you get past the numbers (which are duly disclosed: total spend, DM/IM&S split, number of suppliers, reduction targets, etc it’s all there) one of the most interesting parts of the story is how Ms Kux and Siemens aim to deal with consolidating spend and exploiting the synergy effects.

Siemens have set up a Supply Chain Management board headed by Ms Kux which includes the CPOs of Siemens three largest business segments (Industry, Energy and Healthcare) as well as the Managing Directors of China and the UK and the CFO of the Industry sector. While there is little possible consolidation of DM spend between the three segments, the boards goal is to lower the complexity of the supply base and exploit the possible synergy effects to a maximum. The composition of the Supply Chain Management Board also reflects the internal policy stating that supply chain, finance and development all need to co-operate more.

Ms Kux concludes that she’s very confident that she will succeed with her targets at Siemens as she’s done it before at Philips. Bringing that amount of experience into the equation is probably one of the reasons she was appointed to the managing board of the German giant as the first woman in 160 years.

This entry was posted on April 1, 2009 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Business, Governance, Low Cost Country Sourcing, Supply Chain Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.