How Shell’s S2C digitalisation and AI boosts productivity

Leading a transformation to digitise and automate Shell’s S2C (Source-to-Contract) and E2E (End-to-End) processes, Sander Voorn, the S2C Digital and Process Transformation Design Manager at Shell, discusses how the use of certain digital systems and tools have had a huge and measurable impact on their output.

“My current role is really focused on looking at how we can digitalise,” he says, “and with that, largely automate these processes.”?

Voorn has been in procurement for the last 20 years, starting in an internal supply chain management consulting practice and within that role, helping to manage one of the company’s strategic supplier relationships ? their technology partner for telecoms. From there, he was integral in centralising their procurement activities, moving into a role to digitalise their contingent workforce spend and activities.

How digital tools fuel Shell’s procurement process

Now at Shell, and describing the interplay of procurement structures and systems that brought this transformation about, Voorn says: “Each business has a procurement function, but they fall under one Executive Vice President, and my organisation supports all of these different businesses centrally. We have a few key tools to carry out this function. We have our Category Management and Contracting Process framework, which lays out the requirements that everybody needs to meet, which we incorporated into the system, SAP Ariba, which has embedded DocuSign. We also have Salesforce to complement this process, and a few other systems which together operate to manage the entire end-to-end (E2E) process.”

With the rise of digital systems in business, and their inevitable impact on global procurement processes, the effects are considerable.?

Voorn says: “The biggest changes have been around centralisation, and a growing awareness of the importance and value of data, and the need to structure and standardise that data in order to extract value from it. The risk-management aspect of procurement has fluctuated a little, but in the last couple of years I’ve seen a growing awareness of its importance from a cost perspective, as well as from a differentiator perspective.

“The ability to identify viable organisations ? that is, who from a risk and ESG perspective we want to and not want to be doing business with ? is becoming increasingly important, and I think this trend will continue to grow.”

Growing digitalisation has unmistakable global consequences, according to Voorn: “We are now able to connect End-To-End (E2E) process that would not have been possible in the past.”

One of the main systems in Shell’s entire S2C process is SAP Ariba, where they now manage all of their spend. Describing the process, he says: “From my perspective, it begins with category management. We have categories like contingent workforce, rotating equipment or consulting, for example. These categories are managed by the Category Managers (CMs) who help collect market intelligence and are responsible for providing global steer to a group of buyers.

“The CMs set up these category strategies that detail how we want to go to market. They typically create global framework agreements, which are then made available through SAP Ariba. The next step begins when our buyers are looking to identify demand for a specific contract. They come up with a sourcing strategy, tie this into the global category strategies and leverage the information from them.”

We can already see how much of Shell’s procurement process is carried out within SAP Ariba.?

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