Recentes in brief

Assignment of Recentes in a recovery of supplier conditions always leads to surprising results for our principals.

Today we surprised FrieslandCampina in a different way: we had a tray of hand-made and decorated cookies with their logo made, especially for them. In the form and colour of their beautiful logo.

Nice job, Rianne Lex!

GRIP in brief:

GRIP helps you manage contracts and calculate income from bonuses, for example. The package offers invoicing, forecasts and analyses to support your control and decision-making processes. We developed this package for Retail, Wholesale and Industry.

GRIP will continue to be actively developed thanks to the intensive collaboration between Recentes and AXI. You can expect additional functionality in the future, in keeping with the high demands we place on the quality of our products.

If you want to receive our brochure, send a message to Klaas Ruizendaal. You will receive the brochure soon!

Thank you, Jeroen Van de Broek and Pieter Blomjous and your teams, for your trust and professional co-operation!

The humble Recentes team: Robert Segaar, Derk Hagen, Katja van Esch, Kaj Rosink and Jaap Wieman.

A previous quote from Jeroen van de Broek:

‘Following an extremely pleasant cooperation with Jaap Wieman and the Recentes team at two different companies, I particularly appreciate the down-to-earth mentality, the effective balance between determination and pragmatism, and the combination of recuperation of conditions from the past with advice on improving the suitability of processes for the future. It was a pleasure working together.’

As experts in procurement controlling we are expanding in global recovery of supplier conditions. In our projects we have cooperated with procurement departments in Europe, Near East, Russia and Asia. During our 6 years we have recovered more than Euro 15.000.000,- for our customers.

No cure, no pay

Are you looking for a no cure, no pay recovery on your supplier conditions? A cleanup of your A/P position? A fresh look at your purchase processes? Perhaps our GRIP software for supplier condition management?

Contact us for a discrete, but inspiring call.

Jaap Wieman +31 6 49 61 42 31

On 25 January, the cooperation between Treant Zorggroep and Recentes was sealed with signatures. Recentes will assist Treant with the further professionalisation of their contract and supplier management. We shall be looking back in order to learn for the future. We shall also be checking whether purchasing agreements have been complied with, and will advise on whether processes can be improved.

Managing 3 hospitals and 17 healthcare locations, Treant Zorggroep is an important supplier of healthcare in the north-east Netherlands.

Signing the contract on the photo, from left to right: Fred De Jong (purchasing manager Treant Zorggroep), Jaap Wieman (Recentes) and Olke Dijksma (finance manager Treant Zorggroep). Kaj Rosink of Recentes and Karel Kip of Treant (standing) will be intensively involved in the project in various roles.

Treant is a trendsetter in healthcare thanks to this project: the financial effects and learning effects will be important. Together with our vast experience in the commercial sector, the best of both worlds has now been combined.

On 4 December 2018, we proudly presented our company in the innovations section of the 2018 Retail Innovation Summit organised by AXI. At a very special location and with what proved to be a wonderful ambience: the National Military Museum in Soest, the Netherlands.

At our stand and armed with our brochures, we were able to update many interested retailers about how their organisation can get more GRIP on contracts and conditions.

Did we miss you at this event? Would you like to know what GRIP can offer your organisation? Why not make an appointment with Jaap Wieman for an introductory, no-strings-attached chat.

Telephone: +31 (0)6 49614231

Email: jaap.wieman@recentes.nl

Header photo: Nick Franken

• • Volume: it involves around €85 billion each year.
  • Complexity: healthcare organisations are ‘professional organisations’ (according to management guru Henry Mintzberg).
  • Decentralisation of the expenditure: distributed organisations.
  • Centralisation of purchasing: within an organisation or in purchasing combinations
  • Movement: far-reaching organisational changes, such as mergers and cooperative relationships.

Each sector has specific issues. Within the healthcare sector, the attention may well (tend to) be focused on the accuracy of purchasing prices, VAT issues or the goods flow. Very different to Retail, where bonus conditions play a major role. We shall see! We look forward to working with this healthcare group!

The next few meetings within the healthcare sector are already scheduled. Would you also like to know whether a ‘quick check’ or a Recovery is interesting for your organisation? Why not request our Quick Scan? Within three weeks, you will have a concise report containing an analysis of the general process and the accounts of your organisation. And possibly a proposal for a Recovery.

Would you like to know more? Please send an email to jaap.wieman@recentes.nl.

Could GRIP offer a solution for your organisation?

GRIP is the software package for management of purchasing contracts and purchasing conditions, ideal for Retail, Wholesale and Industry. GRIP helps you manage contracts and calculate income from bonuses, for example. The package offers invoicing, prognoses and analyses to support your control and decision-making processes.

Would you like to know more about GRIP?

The (Dutch) brochure ‘GRIP software: a vital link in your purchasing organisation’ gives more information. If you’d like to receive this brochure, please contact Klaas Ruizendaal (Recentes) or Mike Snepvangers (AXI). The brochure will soon be heading your way! (Soon available in English)

It’s been a hundred days since I, Kaj Rosink, started work at Recentes: a great moment to reflect on how this first period went.

The initial days were pretty overwhelming, as my first working week was spent on a visit to Germany together with my colleagues Jaap Wieman and Robert Segaar. They were long days, whereby my work mainly consisted of requesting statements of outstanding items from suppliers’ debtor administration and checking them against our own administration.

The subsequent weeks were mainly spent at FrieslandCampina in Amersfoort. Here, I began following up on the work which had been initiated during our visit to Germany. The first results soon began to materialise and I was able to book my first (tiny) success.

As time went by, I was assigned more and more diverse jobs: examining contracts for bonus agreements, calculating any agreements I discovered and actually establishing contact with the suppliers in order to render the files complete. It quickly became clear how many different methods exist for retrospective settlement with suppliers.

While many of these settlement processes work well, there are still plenty of cases requiring investigation, caused either by personnel changes, the lack of relevant documentation or suppliers failing to provide information, consciously or otherwise.

I therefore still have plenty of work on my plate for the period to come. There may also be further opportunities for visits (abroad) in search of extra information.

In other words: there’s plenty of investigation work for me at Recentes for the next hundred days too. To be continued!

Comprehensiveness of invoicing is overlooked at many companies. ‘We earn our money at the cash tills in the stores,’ says Dirk van der Werff, group control director of Maxeda DIY. ‘Primarily, we play the retail game. In doing so, we often reach agreements with suppliers that once certain volumes are reached, certain benefits are to be gained. We suspected that there was unclaimed value in there somewhere.

‘We felt that the invoicing of our suppliers was not fully comprehensive and certain benefits that we had agreed with our suppliers were not being invoiced,’ says Dirk van der Werff, group control director of Maxeda DIY Group. ‘Invoicing simply isn’t our core business. We earn our money at the cash tills in the stores. Comprehensiveness of invoicing is a sideline.’

Additional invoicing

‘And so we arranged for a recovery audit,’ Van der Werff continues. ‘We had a specialised party check the comprehensiveness of our purchasing bonuses invoicing. We requested that they establish the connection between registration of our purchasing contracts and the invoicing process in order to check whether it was complete. The Recentes recovery team checked the contracts up to five years back, to evaluate our invoicing entitlements, and used downloads of invoices to determine whether everything had indeed been invoiced. It was all done manually. As we suspected, not everything was complete. We then discussed the situation, both with Recentes and with our suppliers. In certain cases, this resulted in additional invoicing.’

Eye for the relationship with the supplier

‘What the recovery team did really well,’ says Van der Werff, ‘is that they worked with an eye for our interests, but also for the relationship with the supplier. Sometimes the contract contains certain conditions which you would actually rather change, for certain reasons. When working on the basis of no cure, no pay, you might expect the emphasis of the recovery to be on maximum possible invoicing, but that was certainly not the case. Instead, we had effective ongoing consultations about the best possible approach. After all, it’s not always easy to present a third party with an additional invoice at a later date.’

Van der Werff continues: ‘Recentes also advised us on how to register this more effectively in the future. As a result, we have now implemented a contracts database tool in the Netherlands, which we already used in Belgium. A simple press of a button now suffices to check whether we are up-to-date with invoicing all our agreements with suppliers.’

Workflow tool for contract management

‘Our Belgian colleagues already had a workflow tool for contract management,’ says Van der Werff. ‘While the tool may look old fashioned, it has state-of-the-art capabilities. This tool ensures that contracts are signed digitally, that the purchasing value is agreed with the suppliers and that invoicing takes place using the system. The recovery team also conducted an audit in Belgium, where they found very little opportunity for improvement. We have therefore introduced this tool throughout the company now. In principle, we already apply identical systems in all countries, using the same cash till systems everywhere for example. That simplified the implementation process.’

Special cases

Contract management still needed to be effectively arranged in the Netherlands. ‘SAP, with which we work, apparently has a tool,’ says Van der Werff. ‘But there’s nobody on the market offering a total solution. Yet it concerns a substantial component of our results. When a contract condition requires a certain performance in return, somebody needs to signal once the performance is complete, so that invoicing can take place. And that was sometimes forgotten in the past.’ ‘A buyer might agree with a supplier that we receive a bonus if they are allowed to introduce fifty new products. Once those fifty products have been introduced, the buyer needs to inform us that an invoice can be sent. There was room for improvement in these types of special cases.’

Although this does not concern the lion’s share of the purchasing benefits of the DIY retailer, considering the amounts involved, asking someone to check them is certainly worthwhile. ‘SAP does send invoices for ‘standard’ purchasing benefits,’ adds Van der Werff.

Redefining contracts

Besides implementing the tool, the contracts themselves have also been redefined, explains Van der Werff. ‘We now try to avoid the situation whereby we must manually detect any performance to be supplied by us. We now invoice certain amounts at certain times. That makes the system simpler. Even if that entails a certain performance: once it has been invoiced, at least you have started a dialogue with the supplier. It’s also tricky to have the system automatically detect purchasing benefits when these only concern specific components. For example: an agreement regarding white paint with a certain supplier. It’s much easier to agree on a percentage for the entire range. You can make a reasonable estimation of the percentage of white paint you sell, and then automatically invoice that. We’re now making changes in relation to these two aspects. But it will always be part of a commercial agreement of course.’

Central team

Reaching agreements with suppliers is of course mainly the domain of the buyers. How have the latter been included in the process? ‘Establishing contracts with suppliers has now become largely standardised. And where there is no standardisation, a special team makes the agreements. They have an umbrella function for all categories and have been given more and more responsibility over the years,’ explains Van der Werff. ‘The combination of more standardisation and having a central team, has helped us achieve a more uniform system. That’s more effective.’

Recognise the signals

‘We’re making good progress,’ says Van der Werff. ‘However, it’s still tricky to get a grip on the agreements for a certain brand that is featured in a brochure, for example. If a brand is advertised in a brochure, the supplier pays a certain amount. But that amount varies depending on the type of exposure. This makes it complicated to get an effective grip on things. What we would still like to learn is to look carefully at cases of individual agreements and minimise them as much as possible. But on the whole, I believe we’ve come a long way. Of course invoicing simply isn’t our core business. I can, however, recognise the signals nowadays. Wherever I am, I’m immediately aware of how well organised it is.’

Maxeda DIY Group is market leader on the Benelux DIY market, with close to 400 stores and more than 7000 employees. There are 4 DIY chains: Praxis and Formido in the Netherlands, Brico in Belgium and Luxembourg, and BricoPlanit in Belgium. Most of the stores have a floor space of 3,000-5,000 m² and work under the names of Praxis in the Netherlands (153 stores) and Brico in Belgium (148 stores).

Dirk van der Werff (aged 35) studied economics at Groningen University, and is an RA and RC (VU University). As group control director, he is responsible for the central business and financial control activities. Van der Werff has been with the Maxeda DIY Group for 6.5 years, following 5 years as an accountant at KPMG. He is married and has 2 children.

Also read: Actually achieving agreed conditions, is that your top priority too?

8 June 2018 by Anja Jalink

This article was published in CM: 2018, edition 5