Background

Dalkia are a large outsourced Facilities Management and Energy services company headquartered in Staines, Middlesex. They employ approximately 3,500 staff in the UK and have an annual turnover of approximately £400 million.  Prior to engaging with K Consulting, the top management at Dalkia had identified potential areas for improvement in their procurement function, but realised they required external support to deliver the project.

The Project

The first step for K Consulting was to perform an initial diagnostic process, facilitating meetings between Dalkia’s buyers, internal clients and other key stakeholders to determine the scope for a project. They also gathered a wide range of spend data and processed this to determine the features of Dalkia’s procurement portfolio. K Consulting were then able to apply their skills and experience in over 10 category areas to assess the potential deliverable savings.

Following this initial diagnostic process Dalkia then engaged K Consulting to deliver the full project over the next 12 months. Their consultants teamed up with Dalkia’s internal personnel; buyers, operations managers, contract managers and everyone else involved and facilitated their decision making processes. Crucially, Dalkia’s managers made the decisions, owned the outcomes and were central to delivery of procedural change.

Results

In the very early stages, Dalkia were not convinced the savings opportunities were as large as initially identified. The key to unlocking the hidden potential was co-ordination between the key stakeholders in the different areas of the business and applying K Consulting’s skills and experience to the challenges they encountered.

The project was a great success delivering over £2 million in savings and creating a more vibrant working culture and mindset.

Further Development
K Consulting continued to support Dalkia beyond the initial project by defining and implementing changes required to the processes, organisation and information systems, in order that the new approaches used to deliver this initial result became standard practice. The work led to the client being awarded the CIPS Excellence in Procurement Policies & Procedures Award.