Allianz Global Investors: Superior Vendor Management
To derive more value and best serve clients around the globe, Allianz Global Investors is on a transformation journey to optimise and modernise its supplier and vendor management processes. The global asset management firm is leveraging best-in-class technology to supercharge its transformation, says Helmut Boisch, Head of Vendor Management for Allianz Global Investors, including a key partnership with Contract Lifecycle Management leader SirionLabs.
“The journey with SirionLabs stands out,” Boisch says. We use SirionOne to manage everything from the simple but time-intensive tasks of categorising and searching through contracts, to specifics such as surfacing and monitoring obligations and raising those with vendors. “Those things get managed automatically in SirionOne, the smarter contracting platform by SirionLabs,” says Boisch. “That's just one example, but there are many others for how we use SirionOne.”
Other important processes, such as structuring and organising KPIs, creating reporting dashboards for internal stakeholders, and tracking impacts and trends that do not fall within traditional metrics are also seamlessly handled inside SirionOne. But Boisch says the true value of the partnership is in Sirion’s collaborative mindset and innovative vision.
“There are so many things SirionLabs is doing to broaden the way that the software can be used,” he says. “A large organisation like ours will have numerous different software providers that handle different tasks, and Sirion has identified those that they want to partner with, and how they want to partner with them, in a way that provides a benefit to us.
“And that's not even including all of the thought leadership that comes out of SirionLabs,” Boisch adds. “For a software vendor like SirionLabs to not only take the forefront of the development of how one steers a vendor like this, but to also provide the thought leadership and the ecosystem that allows you to connect with other vendor managers, I think that's a very, very powerful thing.”
The result is a true, tightly integrated, holistic supplier ecosystem. Boisch is actively working to onboard more of Allianz Global Investors’ suppliers to simplify documentation, improve collaboration and provide greater visibility and accuracy on obligation oversight. The company is thus all set to extract the maximum value out of their contracts by evaluating contract performance in its truest sense.
“The way that's working now is on a limited basis, specifically with our obligations tracking,” Boisch says. Examples include tracking a certain number of obligations on the part of the supplier, accessing documentation to prove the completion of external audits, or other vital data the firm needs to measure and collect.
“We are always looking at opportunities that require more scope within SirionOne, and how to connect the dots between Sirion and other providers that might be used in complementary departments within our firms,” Boisch says.
“Over time, we'll continue to expand that. We're still looking at how to do this, such as governance meetings that are pushed out through the SirionOne platform, including the meeting minutes. There may or may not be some direct involvement with our suppliers in that case, in the future. This is something that we utilise and will look to expand upon down the road.”
