Recently, Samancor held a ceremony to celebrate the successful launch of Coupa e-procurement system in Johannesburg, South Africa. The management of Samancor and the Coupa team worked hard to overcome the impact of the global epidemic, and after more than eight months of tireless efforts, all Coupa functions went live at Samancor's headquarters and in all eight business units.
Since 2016, Samancor has acquired IFM, Hernic and local ferrochrome companies such as ASA in South Africa and so on in succession. Over the years, it has become the biggest challenge for Operation Director Liu Dong, on how to integrate the formerly fragmented ferrochrome plants and inject Samancor's management system into the newly acquired companies. Samancor has more than 3,300 active suppliers and manages 468 long-term supply contracts at the same time. With 32 procurement staff in different smelters, they need to handle 230,000 purchase orders per year, and 22 financial staffs need to process more than 300,000 invoices per year, making their work extremely stressful. As Operation Director of Samancor, Liu Dong presided the team to develop thinking, innovate management concepts and explore the management mode of procurement. They actively promoted Samancor's management to discuss and make decisions, used the centralized procurement model as an important management tool, built and improved the Company's management system, integrated the acquired enterprises into Samancor's overall development strategy, and improved the Group's overall capacity of management and control.
After much research and comparison, Samancor selected the more modern Coupa e-procurement system. The Coupa system is cloud-based and designed to support logins from multiple mobile terminals. All aspects like supplier development, contract application, approval, invoice entry and query needed to be completed manually in the original ERP system are electronized. The Coupa system has been adopted by Standard Bank in South Africa, the mining company Sibanye and Glencore successively.
After the Coupa project was launched, the whole process of expenditure for procurement will be visualized and a large number of procurement staff will be centrally managed, which will significantly improve the efficiency of procurement operations and effectively reduce procurement and management costs. The operation of the system will effectively improve the efficiency of modern enterprise management and lay the foundation for the creation of a world-class enterprise, while effectively avoiding the offshore integrity risk.