Driving CapEx Project Success Through a Scalable Procurement Solution

The Client

A global leader in the food and agricultural industry, providing food, ingredients and solutions for today's consumers and businesses.

The Challenge

While the client was preparing to undertake a number of significant capital investment projects across North America, they quickly realized they had considerable internal headcount constraints within procurement that would hinder their ability to proceed. These limitations would make it difficult to execute procurement activities efficiently and risked their CapEx projects running over schedule and budget — impacting their ability to deliver value to their business, industry and customers.

The client needed a partner who could provide a fully integrated, third-party procurement team capable of aligning seamlessly with their internal workflows, processes and project teams. This integration would allow them to scale support as needed and keep their internal sources focused on higher-value activities.

The Actalent Solution

Actalent provided a dedicated procurement team to help oversee and manage end-to-end procurement activities throughout the life cycle of each CapEx project.

The procurement team was onboarded through a newly structured training program and management framework we helped establish, ensuring that the team required only a single round of onboarding, allowing for efficient ramp-up and downscaling as needed.

The team was responsible for day-to-day procurement package handling, supporting:

• Organizing procurement packages
• Ensuring agreement compliance
• Securing funding approvals
• Maintaining risk registers
• Coordinating technical bid evaluations
• Leading final negotiations and supplier awards

Actalent taking ownership of these activities allowed the client to continue their CapEx projects, maintain compliance and schedule milestones, and capitalize on their investments. Additionally, our proven experience in managing similar capital project initiatives from a third-party procurement perspective demonstrated our capability to deliver consistent value and integration with client operations.

The Results

Actalent’s procurement team successfully completed over 100 procurement packages, delivering more than $6 million in negotiated savings to the client — an average of 6.16% per package — while consistently meeting key schedule milestones. Every new procurement package and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) was thoroughly analyzed by the dedicated four-person procurement team and managed by one team lead, keeping cost, timelines and quality at the forefront of all the team’s activities.

Throughout the engagement, the team kept key stakeholders informed about progress, giving them a chance to share their feedback on each new package to boost transparency. The team's seamless execution and reliability throughout the project resulted in zero packages being delayed and enabled the client to stay focused on higher-value business activities.

This partnership has proven highly successful, with the client continuing to outsource an increasing number of procurement packages to the team — viewing Actalent as an extension of their procurement department. In addition, our ability to understand the client’s processes and subsequently help standardize onboarding and training templates addressed gaps helped set the client up for long-term success and future efficiency gains.