Can you outline why your team embarked on this project and the problem that needed to be solved?

Air Canada embarked on the project to digitize its Source-to-Pay activities for a variety of reasons, including moving its procurement activities to a single platform, aligning the strategic procurement business with other aspects of the company’s environmental sustainability priorities i.e reducing paper, and most importantly, to gain efficiencies by integrating processes and collaborating in one place. Prior to its digital transformation, Source-to-Pay activities were manual and disconnected. It was challenging to have full visibility and governance over the end-to-end process. 

 

How were things done originally and what was the inspiration to innovate the process?

When conducting sourcing and contract activities, there was a lot of process variation across spend categories. Sourcing projects and contracts were still handled through personal emails and hard drives. There was an opportunity to integrate a corporate purchasing process for indirect spend. Air Canada needed a people, process, and technology transformation. 

 

What KPIs did you use to measure success for this project? (For example: performance, customer satisfaction, revenue, sales or relevant financial gains?)

How do you plan to ensure that the new model remains relevant and adapts to the future needs of the market?

 

How did you get your company and/or stakeholders to get on board and support this project?

From a change management perspective, top-down leadership and corporate-wide sponsorship are essential to be successful. Air Canada’s strong vision statement of “One Standard, One Process and One Technology” aligned all involved parties to the same goals. We invited affected stakeholders early on in the process to be involved with the project, and a change champion from most teams was available to participate. Additionally, we emphasized communication early and often and messages were conveyed widely and supported by leadership.

 

What advice do you have for those who may want to implement this innovative approach in their own organizations?

We knew that it was time to evaluate how the available technologies could benefit us, so we worked with an external firm that performed an assessment, earmarking where we were at compared to our peers. The business case stemmed from that work and featured the financial and non-financial benefits of the transformation. The outcome of the assessment, paired with the expected benefits from the transformation, provided a compelling story that led to Executive approval.