• leverage the individual purchasing power of single companies into a unified whole;
  
  
• develop a center of excellence to manage the procurement process and provide value-added services to Techint/Tenaris companies as well as to third parties;
  
  
• outsource Tenaris’s own processes as well as to adopt the most advanced sourcing, normalization procedures and technology tools;
  
  
• improve transparency of each phase of the procurement process;
  
  
• develop a technological platform to fully leverage the power of the Internet and the most innovative applications in the field of e-procurement;
  
  
• reduce stocks, streamline the supply chain and reduce lead-times
  
  

Exiros and some of the Techint Group steel companies signed a general outsourcing agreement. All of those companies’ procurement organizations were spun off and merged, or insourced, into a new procurement company: Exiros.

The result is a new procurement model. The customer, acting through the mill’s final user, requests goods and services from Exiros, its Procurement Agent. On behalf of customers, Exiros defines operating procedures, standardizes requirements, selects and qualifies suppliers, manages bids and negotiations and prepares contracts. Exiros then coordinates logistics and deliveries, applying strict control measures throughout. The customer closes the process by handling the administrative-financial process with the supplier.

To centralize and outsource the procurement activities in Exiros, it was necessary to standardize purchasing procedures and support them with a single IT backbone. The operating structure includes a single marketplace to register, negotiate and communicate with suppliers around the globe; an MRP to manage contracts and stock; and an e-catalogue with content creation capabilities that ensure consistent data management. A matrix to automatically compare bids and select suppliers, a suppliers’ search engine and other tools were developed to boost the efficiency of the marketplace, and the catalogue was fully integrated to guarantee standardized descriptions of goods and services. This architecture allowed us to consolidate communications through a single front end platform for both suppliers and end users.