THE CONTINUATION OF THE JOURNEY :
ZURICH INSURANCE GROUP
120 and to address design and programme challenges . “ U-Collaborate was a tremendous success . It quickly brought everybody involved up to speed and aligned us on some principles that still steer the programme today .”
Some of the key principles agreed upon at U-Collaborate included :
• The internal customer and employee experience is paramount to the design .
• The entirety of the company would function under one standardised design .
• No customisation of technology : ‘ Adopt not Adapt ’.
• The platform must be fit for purpose across all business units .
“ The success of U-Collaborate confirmed the need for excellent change management and communication strategies ,” says Paiva , “ Changing an IT platform for indirect spend impacts the full organisation and our supply base . To add to this challenge , our end users have been using the same processes and tools for over 10 years , and were accustomed to a high degree of customisation and functionality . We appreciate how difficult it is for end users to migrate to a SaaS application and the need to adopt new ways of working .”
The UK was the first country to implement Coupa , which went live in November 2018 , followed by Switzerland in May 2019 . Spain and Italy are scheduled to migrate to Coupa in early 2020 , along with North America , Germany and Austria later in that year . “ Coupa is the Group ’ s standard platform for S2P and employee expenses and we ’ re expecting the work to continue for some time after the original countries in this rollout are completed .”
THE CONTINUATION OF THE JOURNEY :
“ We ’ ve set the building blocks for the function to play a much more important role in enabling the business to fulfil its strategic objectives , evolving to a place where procurement is recognised internally as a driver of the company agenda .” Evidence of this materialising is the role that the procurement team plays in relation to Zurich ’ s sustainability agenda . In April 2019 , the company announced its aspiration to be known as one of the most sustainable businesses in the world . It followed this up in June by becoming the first insurer to sign up to the United Nations ’ business pledge to limit the global
OCTOBER 2019