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apsolut enables Sanitas to achieve more regulatory security and efficiency gains
Company
Sanitas
Branch
Health Insurance
Products
Compulsory basic insurance and private supplementary insurances
Number of employees
887
Turnover
3.0 bn. Swiss Francs
Headquarters
Zurich, Switzerland
Websitewww.sanitas.com
Success factors: Integration, the right roadmap, close Partnership
“Digital tools are only as good as the way they are implemented and used by employees,” says Michael Spiess, Chief Procurement Officer at Sanitas Health Insurance. Together with his colleagues from the Compliance and Governance departments, he therefore defined four core objectives for the digitalisation of purchasing at one of the largest Swiss health insurance companies:
1. The new purchasing tool must be seamlessly integrated with the also new ERP-system, which is also being developed.
2. The implementation must be carried out with a partner who has the greatest possible technical know-how as well as the process-related understanding of Sanitas’ special needs and regulations.
3. This partner must be able to establish a close relationship with the users in order to gain acceptance for the system.
4. People make the difference: on-site meetings must be possible.
With SAP Ariba, the choice fell on a tool that not only reliably maps the regulatory requirements, but also provides an end-to-end process from the ERP system to purchasing department. The implementation took place on the greenfield, because up to now Sanitas only had a central storage of contracts in PDF format. An end-to-end digital process did not exist until now. SAP Ariba now enables Sanitas to have full transparency in supplier management for the first time and thus solid regulatory security. The solution is audit-capable and, Spiess is convinced, that it will significantly reduce the Maverick-Buying-Quote. As soon as the suite is fully implemented, Spiess also expects a measurable gain in efficiency as a result. In addition, the connection to the Ariba
Network, in which many suppliers are already represented, is a positive argument.
According to Spiess, the reasons for commissioning apsolut were the very open discussions from the beginning and a convincing roadmap:
“We knew that this was apsolut’s first project for a health insurance company, but that didn’t matter. Because apsolut always listened to us, understood our requirements and finally delivered solutions. We could design different processes for direct and indirect purchasing. Together we work professionally in state-of-the-art mode.”
The apsolut Switzerland team led by Remo Eggimann is supporting the Sanitas project team beyond the go-live. The local and linguistic proximity has proven to be very helpful for the onboarding of the employees. Here the team can draw on its wealth of experience in the management of complex transformation projects and knows exactly when which stakeholders need to be integrated into the decision-making and operational processes.
While the Ariba modules Supplier Lifecycle & Performance and Contracts modules went live on 1 February 2022, the Sourcing module will go live in Q4 2022. The implementation of Buying and Invoice Management will start in 2023.
Implemented tools
SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance
SAP Ariba Guided Buying
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Michael Spiess, Chief Procurement Officer, Sanitas Krankenversicherung
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