Promena
Automated Solutions for Effective Online Procurement

In today’s globalized economy, in order to meet their profitability goals, it is a strategic priority for enterprises to focus on equipping their procurement teams with efficient processes. For companies which are spread out geographically, maintaining a centralized control for procurement is not easy. “The need is to have effective technologies coupled with practical and transparent procurement practices to analyze spend and derive savings,” says Ahmet Mithat Dalyan, Senior Executive: Information Technology and Services, Promena. Headquartered in Istanbul, Turkey, Promena offers a whole suite of integrated products that cover the entire procurement lifecycle.

At the core of Promena’s offering is the strategic web-based sourcing platform that brings in efficiencies and improvements in cost, productivity, and risk management parameters within the supply chain. A part of Turkey’s Koc Holding conglomerate, Promena offerings include e-Auction, e-Procurement, and strategic e-Sourcing solutions since 2001.

“In the arena of e-Auction, we play a prominent role as a notary or a referee as the suppliers have the utmost confidence in our platform and the transparent processes that we practice. Every year, we conduct more than 5000 electronic reverse auctions, predominantly in the Turkish market,” states Dalyan. Promena’s expertise and tremendous experience being part of the conglomerate has enabled the firm to handle very big capex projects for hotels, soccer stadiums, power generation plants, and huge construction projects driving in manifold savings. For instance, Promena handled all the negotiation processes for a new refinery reaping in more than 9 percent savings.

Additionally, the firm’s e-Procurement solution automates all the procurement processes aiding in the management of purchase requisitions, RFQs, POs, approvals, and delivery stages to payment and invoicing and integrates with inhouse ERP processes. For instance, the Amerikan Hospital in Turkey faced a challenge in the procurement of medicines— there were thousands of medicines to be procured in any given day which was time consuming for their staff.

In an implementation highlighting the effectiveness of Promena’s procurement platform, “we integrated their demands with our back-end systems and included all their suppliers into our supplier database. Now, the process is automatic and we are creating RFQs for quotations to the various medicine warehouses. Every day, we log onto our platform, invite suppliers, fill up the prices and in a matter of an hour, the purchasing deal is completed,” says Dalyan.

Promena’s Supplier Relationship Management helps to gain visibility and control of suppliers in the entire supply chain. In view of the government regulations and control, it is mandatory for organizations to have quality and environment certificates for all of their suppliers. The solution aids in collecting the updated information of the suppliers to assess risks in the supply chain.

Every year we conduct more than 5000 electronic reverse auctions predominantly in the Turkish market

The firm also offers a modular approach to clients who need a specific solution instead of the whole suite of integrated products. “At inception, our focus was on cost savings, now we are concentrating on the user experience, automating more processes to increase efficiencies to make the technology accessible for small businesses as well,” says Dalyan. “The cost of a simple purchase process, from requisition up to payment, is 450 dollars. We are trying to reduce the amount to simplify the process.”

Promena is also working on image recognition technologies that would make the life of the procurement professionals easy. “You can snap a picture of the item needed and it would get recognized automatically. Triggering an automated process, based on the available information, suppliers would get selected, RFQs would be sent, and all these happen with very less human intervention as possible,” says Dalyan.