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Strategic procurement as a chance

320 suppliers and 7000 different purchased parts! Although strategic procurement concepts are a tough challenge, they provide major advantages for the production flow of our systems for smoking, cooking, roasting and cooling.

When you are standing in front of FESSMANN systems at the customers' sites, you only see a stainless steel body and some electronics at first. That's what I felt like, too, when I saw the first of our plants live. Just as so often, the most exciting things are in the hidden details here, too. Would you have thought that a TF4000 facility is made up of 2,255 different parts? Almost 1700 of the individual components must be sourced externally. You can surely imagine the challenges my colleagues and I face every day. Let me take you on a tour to show you a glance behind the scenes of purchasing at Fessmann. Would you follow me, please ….? Great!

We are two employees in strategic and one in operative purchasing. With our SAP system, we efficiently implement several hundred order requests every day. We want to achieve the optimal delivery date for production and for our service department or our customers alike. Only long-term, open and cooperative partnerships with our main suppliers enable us to reach these targets.

We use various system tools to transparently present the demand and inventory situation of the many parts across the company. Some of them have been programmed specifically for us.
Close cooperation with the up- and downstream departments is important for delay-free processing of the orders as well. Purchasing and potential suppliers are involved early on, making it possible to fully utilise the experience of all parties involved.

The purchasing tasks go far beyond strict procurement processes. We operate active supplier management, with personal visits being very important to us. Combined with permanent market observation and analysis, we can use this to localise savings potentials and optimise purchasing conditions. We also ensure safety of supply and delivery capacity of the entire company by foresighted demand planning.

In the era of digitalisation, we need to go with the trend of the times in purchasing as well. It is all the more pleasing that we are developing continually in this area and are now able to send out orders, e.g., automated as an email. We are also working to make order processes increasingly direct. Another novelty in this area is use of online shops with rights management in C-parts management. This way, the employees in production can independently record, e.g., the demand in grinding discs and the shopping basket only needs to be reviewed and released in purchasing. This way, we improve efficiency of our procurement processes step by step.

As you can see, there is a lot going on in purchasing at FESSMANN. We face new challenges every day. I hope that you have enjoyed this look at the purchasing department's work. Maybe, you will even view our plants a bit differently in future: as more than the beautifully polished stainless steel front, and including the technology and know-how behind it.