All top tier strategic suppliers now collaborating with Vodafone through Vizibl
reduction in proof of concept project duplication globally
When Vodafone’s new CEO of Procurement, Ninian Wilson, joined in 2016, he was clear that innovation, and in particular supplier-led innovation, was essential to driving business growth in a fast-evolving industry.
“Supplier collaboration and innovation is key for us at Vodafone, but the complexity of these projects can make them a challenge to manage.”
A complex global supply chain made it difficult for Vodafone to achieve strategic alignment with all key suppliers on collaboration goals. With activity and data stored across multiple tools, the procurement team had limited visibility into active projects, leading to duplication and inconsistent value delivery.
Vodafone’s size made it hard to implement a standard Proof of Concept (POC) management process worldwide, resulting in fewer innovation projects and idea loss. Vodafone needed a single place to manage and scale supplier collaboration effectively, track project activity and measure the performance of each supplier partnership.
“We replaced many tools and processes with Vizibl which has streamlined how we collaborate and engage with our key suppliers. It’s also scalable, which is important as we have a global supply chain. Because the platform consolidates all of our data in one place, it takes the team just seconds to learn what previously took hours or days. It gives us a level of visibility which we never had before.”
Nadia Benabdallah, Europe Network Engineering Director, Vodafone
Vizibl introduced a single platform to consolidate all supplier collaboration and innovation activities, enabling Vodafone to scale strategic supplier relationship management with a shared vision and agreed governance structure for every key partnership.
Through the Supplier OneView interface, suppliers can co-manage projects from one shared space, introducing a new level of visibility into project health and reducing project overlaps whilst ensuring accountability and ownership amongst all stakeholders.
Along with real-time communication, Vodafone and its supplier partners have significantly improved process efficiency and increased overall project delivery.
“Vizibl allows us to simplify our technology stack in a way that is sympathetic to the security and compliance needs of a global enterprise company like ours.”
Johan Wibergh, Group Chief Technology Officer, Vodafone
Vodafone achieved a faster and more effective POC process that not only increased ideas capture, but also increased the conversion of POCs into fully realised innovation projects, delivering supplier-led innovation back to the business in a much shorter time frame.
Vodafone can now track and forecast value generation from supplier-sourced innovation through real-time reporting dashboards, enabling the procurement team to refine and grow its supplier-led innovation strategy.
This has resulted in Vodafone expanding the adoption of Vizibl worldwide by committing to onboarding its top 300 suppliers in the near future.
“Vizibl gives us a centrally managed platform that helps provide the structure and reporting tools needed for key proof of concept and supplier innovation project to flourish.”
Ninian Wilson, CEO, Vodafone Procurement Company
Vodafone is a multinational telecommunications company serving approximately 640 million mobile customers, 21 million fixed broadband customers and 14 million TV customers. With over 92,000 employees and direct operations in 25 countries, the company has reported group revenues of €43.6bn.
