Strong team spirit and award-winning innovations power PSA to win CIPS Procurement team of the year award

Procurement Team of The Year - Large Organisation - Recognising high-performing procurement teams

The Procurement Team of the Year Award recognises the procurement teams who have made outstanding improvements to their performance and culture which has positively impacted effectiveness, influence, efficiencies, and savings and created a competitive advantage for the organisation.

This year’s winner PSA Singapore stood out with their sensational story of sustained growth in times of extreme adversity. As an award-winning global port operator, PSA insources and self-executes a high proportion of its engineering, operations and maintenance activities.

What impresses judges was how PSA Singapore achieved a record 37.2 million TEUs in 2021, during one of the most challenging years in our recent history with widespread operational disruptions and inflationary market pressures, supply chain shortages and health concerns affecting the world over.

Why PSA Singapore was awarded Procurement Team of the Year:

During the peak of the pandemic and having just implemented a new Source-to-pay module, PSA Singapore proved their tenacity but quickly embraced new work processes in order to deliver on the strategic company agenda in the midst of a Group Procurement transformation journey that impacted all facets of the business. Over this period, the team was successfully awarded 800 contracts worth US$1.2~ billion (with US$93~ million in value improvement) - this included Capex contracts for Tuas Megaport development as well as national projects to support Singapore’s pandemic efforts.

A heroic example of business continuity is the Procurement team executed multiple new initiatives, compounding the complexity and scale of their deliverables. These included onboarding a new cloud-based Source-to-Pay (S2P) module from Oracle, tendering major works for Tuas Megaport and new ship-to-shore cranes for Pasir Panjang port, whilst at the same time dealing with COVID-19 disruptions to the workforce, piloting a new low-value procurement channel, driving sustainability efforts across the business and as well as contributing to the Group Procurement Transformation journey and acting as spearheads for positive organisational change.

PSA Singapore impressed our panel of judges with their example of procurement leadership, determination and the strong team spirit that ensured growth and business continuity, functional and improvement initiatives we met and targets exceeded.

Watch: CIPS Asia Excellence in Procurement Awards 2022: PSA - Procurement Team of the Year

How did they achieve this?

Multi-faceted challenges called for a multi-layered solution! PSA Singapore took a two-pronged approach firstly having a steadfast focus to deliver business objectives and secondly driving continuous functional improvement.

Examples of business improvements:

• New crane capacity for Pasir Panjang terminal: involving diversification and a renewed supplier development strategy to reduce reliance on the dominant incumbent. -
• Curtailment of energy price hikes: PSA made a market assessment of local generation capacity and collaborated with the Energy Market Company which led to a full array of combined strategies.

Examples of functional improvements: 

• Adopted a low-value procurement channel: 100 PSA users given access to catalogue shopping which generated 1440 orders (>US$750,000, 2500 supplier interactions, 37% of all low-value goods), $33,000 claimed through Price Match guarantee and 2000 invoices cut from PSA’s account payables. 
• PSA piloted a new procurement channel which incorporated features such as user self-sourcing, catalogue buying experience, full ERP integration via Supplier Punchout, spend/audit analytics and consolidated self-billing.
• To drive greater S2P usage and performance PSA implemented a data workstream that included defining an end-to-end suite of operational metrics/dashboards as well as the use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to address specific system inefficiencies.

It’s easy to understand why PSA Singapore was awarded the Procurement Leader of The Year Award - congratulations to Ms Tay Guad Ling and her team who despite the challenges brought on by the pandemic, triumphed to deliver a total value improvement of US$93 million for the business!