For more than 100 years, Keolis has been helping people like you travel safely, comfortably, and efficiently. The company embraces the mindset of “thinking like a passenger” in all that they do – so everyone has an enjoyable and unforgettable experience on the rail and transit operations Keolis manages. In fact, Keolis is the leading provider of passenger transformation throughout the United States and Canada.

In 2019, the Procurement function of Keolis North America was created to transform the organization. Historically, the organization operated as a standalone business with the four subsidiaries having little collaboration and cooperation.

Procurement’s Mission: Transform the Organization

This new Procurement function was designed to transform the organization by improving profitability and performance; collaborating across subsidiaries to improve opportunity identification; and identifying pricing and supplier consolidation targets.

“The primary goal was to reduce the number of suppliers and improve the cost structure. In fact, we had about 3,500 suppliers in the company and 70% of those suppliers were responsible for about 20% of the spend. So, supplier consolidation was an important upfront priority,” said Abraham Saxionis, chief procurement officer of Keolis North America.

A Single Solution for a Global Procurement Team to Collaborate

The team quickly formed with four procurement directors reporting to Abraham and more than 20 people who were directly dedicated to strategic sourcing. The business developed a mandate to improve financial performance and profitability through cost reduction. Procurement was responsible for more than half of the cost reductions.

This created a need for technology that could enhance capabilities and reduce manual tasks, provide a source of truth for all projects and progress toward cost reduction goals, and support the business mandate by improving pricing by reducing suppliers.

A Powerful Technology That Brings Everyone Together

The team had a lack of best practices to properly coordinate on cross-functional projects, so that is one of the biggest reasons the Keolis Group selected SpendHQ. Procurement took the lead in setting the objective for tracking the savings goals and progress. Everyone needed access to the data and information to report on Financial performance and share the impact of their work.

The implementation of SpendHQ was straightforward. Each unit participated in the training, which resulted in feeding team projects and individual projects to establish a forecast and project pipeline. “Our team was quickly impressed with the ease of learning and features. The reporting functionalities are extremely helpful. Everyone has embraced the tool positivity – our team is very satisfied.”

In addition, the Finance team has been positive about the set of records and reports provided from the solution.
Now, Procurement feels more comfortable and confident about the reports they are sharing with key stakeholders.

Because SpendHQ is extremely user-friendly, user adoption has been successful as well. The procurement directors can quickly and easily make changes without any issues or roadblocks. The dashboard feature makes finding and sharing relevant information easy and timely.

Moving forward, Keolis has an ambitious goal to become more streamlined and collaborative by focusing on strategic sourcing and performance management; SpendHQ will help support this effort. The team will continue to capture data in the solution and use those insights to make informed business decisions and achieve a greater financial impact for Keolis.

Editor’s note: SpendHQ’s procurement performance management solution used by this customer was originally named Per Angusta, with the renaming following Per Angusta’s merger with SpendHQ in July 2022.