Developing a strategic procurement process: a case study at Boliden AB

Boliden is one of the leading mining and smelter companies in the world. Boliden have mines in Sweden and Ireland and smelters in Sweden, Norway and Finland. Their main products are copper, zinc, lead, gold and silver.

To make it easier to standardize the procurement process and introduce new lead-buyers, Boliden has decided to create a procurement manual. The primary purpose of the Manual is to provide an overview of Bolidens procurement operations, procurement processes and procurement information systems. As such, this Manual provides an awareness of mandatory requirements, policy considerations, guidelines, procedures and best practices. The manual will contain job descriptions for all roles involved in procurement, instructions on how to handle communications, purchasing ethics and policies and detailed descriptions of the procurement process and its sub processes.

In this project this manual is created through interviews and workshops with relevant personnel. The manual is adopted for presentation at the company intranet. In the process of creating this manual five main processes are identified: Governance and administration, strategic sourcing, contracting, operative procurement and supplier management. These processes are mapped in flowcharts and presented in the report.

The final conclusions of this report is that in order to be able to control and measure the procurement process in order to improve it, it has to be properly mapped.

Author: Blomberg, Magnus

Source: Lulea University of Technology

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