Anders Lillevik is a serial Chief Procurement Officer with 20+ years of experience in building and turning around large, complex procurement organisations to be best in class. Anders has extensive background in rolling out new procurement infrastructure and optimising legacy technology investments. With this experience, Anders founded Focal Point to help organizations maximise the value of their procurement spend.
Anders offers the detail on what is on offer at Focal Point.
Anders, what is Focal Point?
Focal Point is a provider of SaaS technology that helps corporate procurement departments gain control of and execute tactical request activity and strategic project work. We orchestrate with existing S2P/P2P, ERP systems and third-party subscription data providers making the project record the FOCAL POINT for operational process control.
What issue does your solution solve?
Focal Point empowers enterprise Chief Procurement Officers to fully modernise and optimise their operations. With Focal Point’s end-to-end procurement management platform, procurement teams can influence every dollar spent, smooth departmental project collaboration, and have real time pulse on benefit accruals all while provisioning activity visibility to all users enhancing the customer experience. Focal Point’s platform integrates seamlessly with legacy procurement infrastructure, ensuring maximum ROI on existing investments.
Who is your solution aimed at? What does your perfect client look like?
Focal Point is an essential technology addressing value levers benefiting the c-suite. Literally every company struggles managing innumerable requests coming from their business users along with planning, management and execution of annual strategic works where the majority of a procurement department’s value is extracted. Existing legacy systems don’t offer this level of enterprise project activity engagement and execution.
Focal Point gives leadership visibility to:
- What projects are being worked on
- Who’s working on said projects
- Where projects are in flight
- Bottlenecks
- Cycle times & SLA’s,
Additionally, companies that are transforming procurement to drive operational efficiencies, get more spend under management, standardise workflows as part of any project activity type, track benefits real time and increase the overall quality of user experience.
What is the biggest challenge Focal Point faces?
There are a number of challenges we face at Focal Point. The procurement orchestration market place is in its infancy and as one would expect there are a limited number of companies that find themselves as early adopters. Thereby, there’s a limited pool of companies investing and finding them and being found is always a challenge.
Would be buyers struggle to find credible content and understand the depth and breadth of transforming operational process control (ie Procurement Orchestration). There is often overlap between point solutions like supplier onboarding or CLM vs. true ENTERPRISE orchestration tools like Focal Point. For example, point solutions may offer “intake” within their system but it’s not really capable of being an enterprise “front door” that can truly support “intake to anything” handling literally any sort of request to any department.
Finally, we’re seeing some platforms that were built for non-procurement departments being shoehorned into procurement with belief they can do the job. Procurement is truly specialised and requires resident expertise that’s rarely available within IT. These solution approaches tend to be costly, rigid, resource intensive and difficult to deploy vs. Focal Point.
Why pick Focal Point?
Based new client interviews and speaking with qualified market analysts Focal Point delivers this unique competitive advantage;
- Focal Point is built from the inside out by highly experienced procurement practitioners vs. outside in by technologists trying to solve procurement project activity management problems. Our approach creates a user experience that operates the way procurement thinks and the operational functionality aligned to how procurement works. The devil is in the detail.
- FLOWS (project workflow orchestration engine) is Focal Point’s unique technology delivering powerful smart workflow to manage simplistic to highly complex project types automating literally any type of work activity.
- We modularly bifurcate managing tactical request activity from annual strategic work enabling planning and execution of each independently, solving tactical request management ensures procurement stewardship to business user requests. The big rocks of value procurement are responsible for primarily comes from execution of strategic project activity. Focal Point allows procurement organisations to tackle the areas operational process control that matter most then add functionality as needed.
- Focal Point is the only platform delivering end-to-end procurement orchestration from “intake to outcome” for both tactical requests and strategic project activity. Outcomes roll up into benefits management eliminating the use of static spreadsheets and manual processes.