Faster RFQs for Worley Procurement
Worley is one of the world’s premiere engineering project management and consulting firms, serving the energy, chemicals, and resources sectors with both EPC and EPCM models.
When Worley moved its procurement activities to the Requis platform, their procurement teams noticed the time savings within two months.
Results:
- 81% savings on time needed to create major equipment packages (actual average hours needed to create a full package dropped from 16 hours to 3 hours)
- Onboarding time required: 2 hours
(versus weeks required by ERP systems) - 1,000+ RFQs issued within months
(proving teams were actually using Requis, instead of finding workarounds)
With over 9,500 energy, resources, and chemical sector suppliers on the platform, procurement managers and buyers now have an easy way to source everything they need for new projects. Because it’s free to sign on to Requis, it’s a low barrier to entry experience for suppliers and enterprises alike.
The challenge: visibility into communications and documents
In typical procurement cycles for complex engineering projects, getting the initial RFQ issued is the first of many milestones. It’s the subsequent technical queries that go back and forth between the suppliers and the engineers, however, that become truly time consuming and introduce risk.
As Carraway explained, “There are a ton of emails. What it turns into is a chain of emails that goes back and forth with one supplier, and then a second with another supplier, and so on. We then have to ensure the same messages are communicated to all of those suppliers, and record their answers.”
Some engineers, she noted, use a spreadsheet to record answers and to go back and forth between suppliers.
“It’s a transactional and administrative nightmare, to be honest,” said Carraway.
If there’s ever an issue or audit, information is difficult to find—something Carraway has experienced first-hand. “During one audit, I had to go over hundreds of emails to find that one email that the auditor was looking for, where the engineer did indeed confirm a certain item,” she said.
Even if everything goes smoothly, the net result is months spent on technical questions for mechanical packages for major projects.
The solution: the Requis Procurement module
“Requis is very industry standard,” said Carraway. “It is literally capturing every step that any EPC or any procurement cycle will go through.”
The Requis platform is designed to manage a full open bid process, from the point when an RFQ is issued to dozens of suppliers, to the award of the final contract to the chosen suppliers. Everything from communication threads to document collections are available from one central dashboard.
The procurement module is designed to save time at every stage. Tools like batch uploading makes it easy for procurement teams to add files to an RFQ, and CSV export feature allows for easy, line-by-line bid comparisons.
This is a far cry from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems Carraway has used before, some of them multi-million-dollar custom integrations.
“These systems literally start from PO placement, and then they’re utilized by our clients primarily for invoicing purposes, because they are working mostly their preferred suppliers.”
She and White have used several industry leading systems, but they did not, she said, “have the full RFQ capability, and don’t have that inquiry module.”
“Other systems don’t have quite the steps that are involved to capture the industry standard format.”
The impact: time savings
Streamlining communications and storing all information in a central repository provided a wealth of efficiencies to the Worley team.
“Once we engage engineering on the use and application of Requis that’s really where we’ll see the most time saved by efficiencies,” said White. “Not only the approval process and getting all the commercial and technical clarifications, but just the time that we usually have to spend facilitating the conversation and following up with all parties, supplier and internal, I think that’s where the biggest implementation will come from.”
The document storage was also helpful. “It did give us the action of uploading very large files and utilizing that almost as a file transfer tool, without us having to create a link on our own FTP site, attaching it to our emails and going forward with that,” said Carraway.
White commented, “It does do batching a lot easier. It saves us time that way if we have multiple suppliers and we have some additional project requirements.”
Carraway also commented that Requis will help make meetings go faster. “I can see how this would become the single point of reference for communication for the entire project team. For example, if you have a conditioning meeting or a technical tabulation meeting, everything’s right there in one housing database.”
Providing consistency to communication formats also streamlines information processing by everyone on the team. “The user also becomes more conscious because he now knows that he’s on a platform, there are rules to be followed and you can’t go about in an undirected manner.”
Designed by supply chain professionals, for supply chain professionals
Learn the basics in one hour
Unlike most ERP systems that take weeks or months to learn, Requis can be learned in a matter of hours.
Commenting on the short ramp-up time, White said, “I really felt like we did a 45 minute or one-hour meeting. We went over several different options and how to run through issuing out an RFQ, and a few questions later, we issued two or three requisitions without incident. It is easy to pick up.”
“It’s extremely user-friendly from my perspective; it’s intuitive, and it’s easy to follow through the steps,” agreed Carraway.
Manage the full asset lifecycle on one cloud platform
Requis’ procurement module is just one of the platform’s capabilities. Designed to allow enterprises to buy, manage, and sell assets easily, Requis uses asset records to gain visibility into the larger supply chain. Once created, the asset records can be transferred to other companies when the asset is sold.
Requis also connects easily to other systems via API, so the finance team can continue to use their favourite ERP.
Find out how Requis can save time and costs for your enterprise.