Use of vendor management system leads to award
LBBW Wins Innovation Prize with Infutura
Berlin / Heidelberg, November 11, 2008 – Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) is one of the first companies in Germany to use the “Infutura” vendor management system (VMS) from reutax AG. The solution helps LBBW find freelance IT specialists and match current requirements to their profile. For the “automated procurement of IT services,” LBBW has been awarded the BME Innovation Prize by the German Association of Materials Administration, Purchasing and Logistics (Bundesverband Materialwirtschaft, Einkauf und Logistik e.V., BME) at the 43rd Symposium in Berlin. The BME Innovation Prize is given for sustainable concepts in purchasing and logistics and is considered to be the most important award in the industry.
The procurement solution makes it possible for LBBW to make transactions with personal services in a way that is analogous to the method it uses to purchase goods. “The newly created solution made it possible for us to order consulting services electronically for the first time,” said Rudolf Zipf, a member of LBBW's board of directors. Using the system, employees of the state bank can, among other things, hire freelancers just as easily as they have been able to order hardware and software until now.
LBBW developed the solution in cooperation with staffing specialists reutax AG of Heidelberg and wallmedien AG of Paderborn. In the process, the Infutura VMS system was seamlessly integrated with LBBW's existing procurement system.
The web-based solution makes possible standardized and automated processes in the purchase of services. The intelligent Infutura search enables purchasing of external project support by freelancers in a simple, intuitive way that is catalogue based. Additionally, preferred experts are saved in a pool of favorites for direct access in the future.
Infutura also represents a communications platform for all administrative processes in the procurement of freelancers – beginning with the announcement of the job, it also includes the selection of appropriate candidates, the organization of interviews, the ordering of services, time recording and billing. The processes are transparent for everyone involved and as a result can be evaluated by special reports. This means that freelancer procurement with Infutura is also tamperproof, and contributes to the observance laws and guidelines in companies.
The developers dedicated particular attention to the subject of data protection. This corresponds to current requirements, since the system does not in any way transport personal data, but instead captures subject specific information that is essential to the search according to a precisely delineated expert profile.
For weeks LBBW has been running the Infutura VMS system on a high performance level with 210 users. Of the roughly 1,500 assignments for IT freelancers that occur every year, in the future about two thirds will be placed through Infutura. This will allow the state bank to achieve significant and sustainable cost savings.
“With this solution LBBW has attained a new level in the purchasing of IT services,” said Soheyl Ghaemian, CEO of reutax AG. “By using the vendor management system, companies can realize savings potential of up to 30 percent. For this reason we firmly believe that the Reutax vendor management system will establish itself as a business standard.”