Building One Procurement Model Across Global and APAC Operations
How a Multinational Chemicals Company Streamlined Procurement – Including IT Hardware – to Drive Sustainable Profitability
A leading multinational chemicals company was facing declining profitability. Procurement was fragmented across business units and countries, with limited transparency and weak alignment between regional and global teams. Over 70 % of indirect spend was managed through spot buying or short-term contracts, eroding margins and limiting strategic leverage.
To strengthen competitiveness, the company needed procurement to evolve from a transactional function into a strategic lever for margin improvement. One capable of delivering immediate EBITDA savings while embedding sustainable practices across the organization.
Materials & Process Industry
Inverto’s Approach
The team designed and executed a comprehensive procurement transformation built on alignment, transparency, and negotiation excellence.
Creating One Team Across Regions
Inverto established joint governance councils uniting stakeholders from multiple countries and business units under shared objectives. This alignment created one team and one direction, enabling faster decision-making and cross-regional execution.
Establishing a Single Source of Truth
The team consolidated fragmented spend data from over 20 systems into a central view, providing credible baselines that all stakeholders could agree upon. This single source of truth became the foundation for category-level strategies and fact-based negotiations.
Structured Negotiation Preparation and Execution
Inverto guided the development of detailed negotiation playbooks, market analyses, and competitive benchmarks. Negotiation teams applied multiple value levers, including volume bundling, e-auctions, should-cost models, and supplier rationalization. Structured check-ins after each negotiation round ensured disciplined follow-up and strategic consistency, while maintaining a strong focus on win-win outcomes with suppliers to build sustainable relationships.
Embedding Capability and Future Readiness
To ensure lasting impact, Inverto delivered a six-part training series on negotiation excellence for regional category managers and provided playbooks, tools, and best practices for ongoing application.
Category Deep Dive IT
The company’s decentralized IT hardware sourcing had resulted in fragmented spend, inconsistent specifications, and limited leverage with global vendors. Inverto led a global sourcing initiative that consolidated the scope across all regions and established standardized hardware specifications and refresh cycles. Through a structured RFP with leading OEMs, the team negotiated a unified global agreement that strengthened warranty coverage, aligned service levels, and introduced clearer lifecycle management.
By shifting from local purchasing to a centralized global strategy, the company unlocked over 30 % total cost-of-ownership reductions while enhancing service quality. Additional value was generated through asset-based purchasing, competitive pricing pressure, and improved supplier terms that ensured zero compromise on global support standards. The result was a scalable IT procurement model that delivered sustainable savings and a consistent user experience across all regions.
Impact & Results
The transformation delivered multi-million savings and more than €30 million in EBITDA impact, immediately strengthening profitability and creating a foundation for long-term competitiveness.
Procurement has evolved from a fragmented, reactive function into a strategic, structured organization with transparent data, disciplined negotiation processes, and clear governance across regions.
A blueprint for future negotiations was created, that enables teams to continue delivering savings. The client now has the tools and capabilities to replicate these results across categories and regions, embedding negotiation excellence as a lasting source of value creation.
This transformation showed how procurement, when elevated from silos to strategy, can unlock significant value and provide a framework for long-term competitive advantage.
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