Focal Point: Pioneering Procurement Orchestration
Anders Lillevik is CEO and Founder of Focal Point. Established just over four years ago, Anders has helped the company achieve rapid growth, leveraging his 25+ years of experience in the procurement space, and as a former Chief Procurement Officer for several large-scale organisations.
During his time as head of procurement at these large organisations that inspired Anders to found Focal Point.
“I’ve implemented a lot of procurement systems in my time, from Coupa and Rebuy to Ivalua, Zycus and Oracle,” he says.
“Despite the high costs of implementing procurement tech, the challenge was always in sourcing – particularly when it came to supplier management – which typically relied on the worker using Excel.
“Working this way, it was hard to manage at scale at these large-scale organisations.”
Indeed, procurement orchestration is procurement at its core; it’s what gets stuff done from right to left across an entire organisation. Completing these core challenges manually has, therefore, always been a challenge historically.
“For years, this has been a process completed poorly in Excel,” continues Anders. “That’s why I started Focal Point, to create a solution where procurement activities can be effectively tracked, big or small, whether that’s a complex request for proposal (RFP) to a contract renewal.
“With Focal Point, you know what’s being done, who’s doing it, and can ensure the process is being followed with all the leave-behinds that someone in auditing would want there to be.”
Focal Point: The guiding principles of procurement orchestration
At Focal Point, there are several guiding principles for effective procurement orchestration. The first is the need to normalise and consume data; the second is to have data work across conditional and contextual workflows – with data that is consumed needing to be centralised and viewable.
Then, thirdly, automation can occur, because everything related to a particular supplier or stakeholder is displayed in a singular view.
“The aim is to have automated intelligence complete mundane tasks in the background without human intervention so that things can happen fast. When human intelligence is required, it must be made apparent. This is what Focal Point is all about,” continues Anders.
“We have a platform that sits on top of existing infrastructure that performs many roles in addition to normalising and centralising data. It allows users, for example, to see a supplier's open POs, contracts, invoices and risk categories in one convenient location.
“Then it provides recommendations, which can be turned into projects and opportunities, enabling the user to manage procurement holistically.”
A CoupaLink-certified partner
The success of Focal Point has seen it become a CoupaLink-certified partner. Today, it has two Coupa relationships, recently partnering with Coupa to help deliver project management and procurement operations around tracking, savings and cycle times.
“We’ve been a CoupaLink-certified partner for almost three years now,” concludes Anders.
“It’s a partnership that we enjoy and we hope it can continue to flourish in the future.”
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