Dating back to 1868, Doka has over 150 years of heritage in the construction industry, providing its customers with reliable, experienced and trustworthy services, “listening intently” to understand the world through the eyes of its customers. Describing the company and the services it provides its customers, Thomas Zsulits Director Global Procurement at Doka says, “Doka is a market leader in many countries when it comes to formwork for public, private or commercial customers. We are also on a good way of becoming market leaders in scaffolding. Our most prestigious projects have been the Burj Khalifa in Dubai or the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia. But also in infrastructure projects Doka is seen as the partner of choice for bridges, tunnels or cooling towers.”
How Doka transformed its procurement operations
Doka is operating globally. They formed a global organization 3 years ago and have just undertaken another step to become a more effective and modern organization.
Mirko Loos, Head of Material Group Management at Doka, explains that “before Thomas started at Doka 3 years ago, purchasing departments had only been existent in larger countries or countries with a production operation, like Austria, Slovakia and Germany. Their main focus was on material disposition for production. Global agreements had been existent, but sourcing was mostly done locally or regionally, at max.”
A new procurement structure was introduced in 2018, and it was meant to secure an effective material disposition on the one-hand side, responsible for managing the P2P process and providing support to local stakeholders on day-to-day operational issues. On the other side, a separate team was formed focusing on strategic work which otherwise would remain undone, like developing effective sourcing strategies, or delivering other typical value propositions to the Organization. The operational teams remained in the countries mentioned before. As of 2021, they will become part of support units responsible for operational procurement, invoice control and MDM and covering our regions Middle East/Asia Pacific, Americas and Europe. Our strategic teams have since undergone the largest transformation from a split in local, regional and global teams into category teams as part of our global Material Group Management (MGM) and on the other side Supply Business Partners (SBP). Our SBPs are now forming the backbone of Procurement to meet all imminent needs of our internal stakeholders. They are close to all internal customers and help MGM with their strategy implementations but will also be a source of information for other procurement colleagues when it comes to understanding our customer’s pains & gains better.
In order to ensure a smooth transition for its procurement transformation, Loos adds that “from the very start, there was the idea to put SAP/MM in place and have a catalog system to minimize the workload for our operational procurement. And alongside a proper P2P process, we’d enhance our data with proper spend classifications and that way could improve our spend visibility over time. Crucial for effective strategic work.
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