HL Display
The Challenge
The Solution
The Result
Sunny Yang
Group Purchasing Director
HL Display
Taking Supplier Management From Manual to Magnificent
HL Display help retailers and brands around the world to create attractive and profitable in-store environments that strengthen the consumer’s shopping experience. The vision is to be the preferred partner in their industry leading the development of innovative and sustainable solutions for a better shopping experience around the world. From store communication, merchandising, and secondary displays to bespoke design and services, HL Display is an expert in improving the shopping experience whilst increasing cost efficiency and maintaining environmental sustainability.
HL Display has production sites in Sweden, Poland, China, and the UK combined with sales units across more than 20 countries.
HL Display wanted to save time on conducting supplier self-assessments & overall supply chain compliance reporting. The Group Purchasing team recognized supplier risk management as a pillar to help meet their sustainability goals. With over 700 suppliers and much of their supplier data localized on different entities' ERP Systems and in employees' computers – like in spreadsheets, notes, and emails – HL Display had a hard time leveraging their supplier data in the most efficient way. Information was scattered & processes required heavy manual work, which meant supplier self-assessment campaigns sometimes took as long as 8-10 months to finish.
Kodiak Hub's software has helped HL Display centralize, onboard, and collect supplier data from their most important suppliers – getting their teams out of their localized notes and spreadsheets – into a consolidated platform where all Purchasing Managers and Buyers can access and evaluate the same supplier data and information.
HL Display leveraged Kodiak Hub's solutions for self-assessment & onboarding, building customized self-assessments templates with a dynamic drag-and-drop template builder. Combined with a rating methodology and global library of international & industry best practices, they made sure every requirement was being covered. With support from Kodiak, HL Display also had the possibility to offer their suppliers to choose different languages when they answered the self-assessment questionnaire.
With the self-assessments built, HL Display could set up an automated workflow that would ensure that all suppliers received their assessments in time, tailored to their segments/categories. HL Display leveraged the supplier rating methodology and automated notifications to quickly identify missing data or documentation from supplier responses. In turn, HL Display has been able to issue corrective action faster, via Kodiak Hub's collaboration tools in the platform – keeping all communication & documentation centralized in Kodiak Hub's platform.
HL Display went from working 8-10 months to create, send out, gather, and report on their supplier self-assessments & supply chain compliance – to just 3 weeks from start to finish.
Through the application of better SRM software, the team also managed to meet their goals of 90% of their suppliers showing they live up to HL Display's code of conduct, thus meeting their sustainability goals.
Going from Manual to Magnificent.
"We have changed a lot since adopting Kodiak Hub. Before we used to work with the same tasks as we do today but everything was very localized: on one person's computer, on an excel sheet, etc. And most tasks weren’t standardized or automated.
Our Purchasing Managers really appreciate the implementation of Kodiak Hub and think it has helped their day-to-day tasks a lot!"
“Kodiak has helped us to rate suppliers and categories within various dimensions – it has helped us create a very systematic and standardized purchasing function at our company and to set up new processes to ensure this.
Our management team feels we are very secure and sure of who we’re buying/sourcing from thanks to Kodiak Hub – increased supply chain visibility has created a sense of calm, which is very much appreciated.”
“Our suppliers have been really positive to the shift to using Kodiak Hub. They think it’s easy to work with.
They think the platform is easy to handle and to understand – the assessments and questions are easy to understand and to answer in a timely manner.
A broad range of questions can be set up covering many different areas, and when content is better divided to be category/geographically specific it increases relativity and engagement."
“With our previous SRM solution it took us 8-10 months to have our most important suppliers finish their self-assessments. With Kodiak Hub we managed to get the same work done in 3 weeks.”
Sunny Yang
Group Purchasing Director
HL Display