This week on the podcast I’m joined by two guests, because we’re actually going to be talking about a customer success story on the show.

Børge Langedal, Co-Founder and CRO of Norwegian spend analytics, vendor and category management tool Ignite Procurement joins me together with Arndt Romer from their German customer SEG Automotive.

We dive into how and why SEG Automotive chose Ignite as their digital solution and how they’ve seen benefits since its implementation.
Building a digital strategy with the right partner after a divestiture
SEG Automotive is best described as a large medium-sized business focusing predominantly on automotive products.

With 7,000 employees across 14 locations and annual turnover of €1.5 billion (approx. $1.9 billion). Based in Stuttgart, Germany, they were spun off from Bosch in early 2018 and therefore had to develop their own in-house systems as part of the divestment.

Ignite Procurement is based in Oslo, founded in 2016 by an ex-BCG team and has since grown to 50 employees. It’s a spend management solution to make strategic procurement easy, with data management and procurement analytics as the core offering.

Bosch had a well developed system landscape which essentially SEG would no longer have had access to after the carve-out and them becoming an independent company.

This led to the need to find and develop their own digital procurement and spend management strategy to enable them to have access to good, clean data without being dependent on an ERP system and Excel spreadsheets.

Bosch had a central procurement team and a lot of the main team at Bosch remained there, which resulted in the need to hire and onboard a lot of new team members when SEG was carved out from Bosch. The transition from following the processes and internal controls of a global corporation to becoming a leaner and more agile mid-market business necessitated the need to improve their reporting and decision-making landscape.
How did SEG arrive at the decision to select Ignite Procurement?
Arndt mentions that it was a three-prong strategy. 

They were aware of some of the more well-known tools and approached them to understand what they could offer. They also considered out-of-the-box solutions such as Power BI, as well as exploring the possibility to develop some in-house solutions. On top of this, they had a digitalisation team internally who was out there going to different trade fairs, researching niche / best-of-breed solutions on the internet to discover tools that were not already known to the business. It was at one of these trade fairs shortly before COVID hit that they were introduced to Ignite.

Bringing these three approached together required a scorecard to allow different stakeholders to evaluate the capabilities of each of the different solutions. This enabled them to move forward to pilot phase with shortlisted vendors, at which point, Arndt says it became obvious that Ignite was clearly the best solution for what they were looking for. 
How did Ignite Procurement go about assessing and evaluating SEG Automotive’s needs vs. their offering?
First and foremost is understanding whether they can indeed solve their challenges and meet their requirements. Trying to be everything to everyone ultimately is a road to disaster!