Executives of top Spanish firms meet at 16th iSOCO eSourcing Forum to discuss transformation of Purchasing Department

• The ICT company held this latest forum in Barcelona, bringing together over a hundred professionals to assess the need to optimise the sourcing function, an area that is becoming increasingly strategic in improving business competitiveness

• The chairman of Spanair, Ferran Soriano, was one of the speakers in the forum, the only event of its kind in Spain focusing on supplier relationship management, and to which Bankinter, Leroy Merlin and Laboratorios Kin also contributed their experience

Barcelona, November 2011.- A total of 100 executives from Spanish companies in a wide variety of industries came together yesterday at ESADECREAPOLIS for the 16th eSourcing Forum, an event that reflects on how to increase the competitiveness of organisations by transforming the purchasing department responsible for relationships with the supply market.

It is the only forum in Spain aimed at generating knowledge, sharing best practices and analysing the commercial relationship with suppliers as a strategic factor for companies, as well as the need to incorporate more productive management methods in the acquisition of goods and services for an enterprise.

The day, which iSOCO has been organising on a regular basis for the past eight years, highlighted the fact that business efficiency is not viable without the Purchasing Department seeking the involvement of every area of the company in the relationship with suppliers and without taking advantage of the resources offered by new technology to optimise this relationship.

The iSOCO general manager, Javier Aróstegui, underlined the fact that "the impact of Purchasing on a company's balance sheet is growing, so innovation must be adopted to standardise processes and reduce costs".

Satisfied with the high turnout in this latest eSourching Forum, Aróstegui indicated that: "In the current economic context it has become a priority, more than ever, to transform management of contact with the supply network to reduce sourcing costs, standardise the whole negotiation process - from requesting information to final allocation of the contract - and, in short, optimise each purchase that the company makes.

Innovative experiences: Bankinter, Leroy Merlin, Kin and Spanair

The Bankinter innovation manager, Nicolás Moya, in his lecture entitled 'Open innovation: what to do', discussed his organisation's method which, through Bankinter Labs, a virtual meeting place for knowledge gathering developed by iSOCO, drives the generation of ideas and builds an innovation plan for adding value to the company. Moya explained that "having ideas is easy, the difficult thing is implementing them", and he listed some of the actions recently introduced by Bankinter based primarily on a commitment to mobility.

Under the title 'MDD: a competitive advantage of Leroy Merlin', the company's product manager, Rafael Burgos, based his talk on the importance of the distributor's brand as a strategic tool for the DIY multinational, and he presented the supplier relationship model that has been implemented by his company.

In his lecture on 'Innovation with strategic partners', the general manager of Laboratorios Kin, Carlos Izquierdo, highlighted the improvement of the organisation's results on the basis of the evolution of its supply chain management. Izquierdo presented the progressive simplification of the company's provisioning channel over recent years and the direct impact on this oral health laboratory's financial results.

Finally, the chairman of Spanair, Ferran Soriano, brought the forum to a close. Under the title 'Spanair: transformation experience', Soriano explained the need for a constant search for innovative and efficient management methods in a highly competitive environment like the airline industry.

The eSourcing Forum was set up in 2003 by iSOCO with the aim of becoming a meeting place in which leading companies could share their experiences in the field of innovation in relation to the supply markets and providers. On this occasion, the company wanted to give it a different focus, contributing new approaches to the discussion on the role that this department plays in the success of a business.

About iSOCO

iSOCO is Spain's foremost ICT company with a clear commitment to internationalisation as a leading technology provider to help companies develop and position themselves in the Network Economy. It has its own R&D centre, iLAB, and it stands as an international leader in semantic technology and artificial intelligence. Its main differentiating factor resides in the combination of a range of services based on proprietary technology.

It was founded in 1999 as a spin-off of the CSIC (the Spanish High Council for Scientific Research) and has a clear global outlook and local presence in the main markets. It is the only Spanish company to appear in the WCM Marketshare2010 and the instigator of the Spanish LinkedData Association (AELID).

With blue-chip clients like Almirall, AstraZéneca, Bankinter, BT, Colt, Grupo Leche Pascual, La Caixa, Repsol YPF and Zurich, among others, iSOCO is internationally renowned and possesses one of the most comprehensive semantic engines in the world: Semanti-K ®

Elena Castells
Marketing & Communication
ecastells@isoco.com
Av. Torre Blanca, 57
Edificio ESADE CREAPOLIS, Oficina 3C 15
08172 Sant Cugat del Vallès, BCN
(t) +34 93 567 72 24

This release was published on openPR.