'Get together with Marrakech'
Institute of Directors, London
14 November 2007

For over twelve months now, Marrakech has been part of the AMT-SYBEX Group. During this time there have been some significant investments into the Marrakech brand and the business has grown substantially.

The company now works with over 30,000 procurement and supply chain professionals bringing significant savings to these organisations by optimising their procurement operations. By developing and expanding its solution offering, Marrakech is now pushing into a variety of new sectors.

To celebrate this exciting time, Marrakech hosted a one-day customer event at the Institute of Directors in London, focused on bringing customers together to share success stories.

The event, chaired by Andy Hamlyn, CEO Marrakech and group director for AMT-SYBEX, gave Marrakech the opportunity to highlight its extensive industry know-how, showcase best practice as well as discussing a forward thinking roadmap for the future.

Following an opening and welcome from Steve Norris, AMT-SYBEX Group Chairman, the day’s proceedings kicked off with a presentation from Chris McLean, lead project manager for the Identity & Passport Service (IPS). As an executive agency of the Home Office, IPS has installed Marrakech’s e-procurement solution to help streamline its buying procedures during a period of exponential growth and change in service delivery.

Chris was supported in his presentation by colleagues Mac Exon-Taylor, Eclipse Commercial Adoption Manager, and Chris Corfield Head of Finance Strategy. Mac talked the group through the approach IPS took in terms of Supplier Enablement, working on the 80-20 rule they discovered that 80% of their spend was split across only 20% of their supplier base. By focusing their efforts on bringing these suppliers on board, IPS were able to achieve an excellent level of user buy-in. Chris Corfield then followed Mac to discuss the business benefits and how they went about actually realising the savings. Chris told the audience how he has subsequently measured significant savings since the system went live.

Steve Burrows, group IT director for JLA, a leading supplier of commercial laundry equipment, followed IPS’s presentation and provided an insight into how Marrakech’s Reqio mobile solution is helping improve field service operations in his business. 

As a service driven company, JLA relies on its reputation as a reliable partner as one of its key selling points. So parts ordered incorrectly can cause unnecessary additional call outs to customers, as well as JLA incurring financial penalties. The solution has enabled JLA to store over 50,000 parts on a handheld device, removing the need for their engineers to carry large amounts of paper manuals.

Not only has the solution enabled their engineers to automate the whole parts ordering process, with the removal of the bulky manuals from their service vans, it has given JLA more space for additional parts. This, in turn, has seen their first time fix rate increase.

Next on stage was Michael Whitby, an industry consultant who has held high-level procurement positions in companies such as Barclays, Reuters, NatWest and BAA. He highlighted the need for organisations to reassess their procurement strategies to address changing dynamics in the supply chain industry, and also stressed the importance of building strategic supplier relationships to ensure sourcing needs are met at times of scarcity.

Following lunch, Ad Wijten spoke about how data enrichment through Marrakech is helping his company, Impress, reduce its purchasing and sourcing costs. As a world leading manufacturer of metal packaging, Impress has 60 production plants across 20 countries all of which have similar sourcing needs.

By working with Marrakech, Impress has implemented a three tier sourcing strategy which encourages transparency of purchasing information between plants through the sharing of best-practices and standard supplier catalogues – a move which is helping Impress negotiate better supplier contracts, identify ordering patterns across plants and achieve significant cost savings.

The final presentations of the day came from Conor O’Donovan and Dan Morgan from Marrakech, who gave the event attendees an insight into the Marrakech product roadmap with details of proposed software developments and enhancements as well as the release strategy for the next 12 months for the Marrakech Product set.