When Royal BAM Group, a major construction company headquartered in the Netherlands and active in the UK and Ireland, began its digital procurement journey ten years ago, it was operating across many ERP systems with no central view of spend and no central contract repository. Contracts were handled on paper and by email, and nobody could answer a basic question: who are we spending money with, and where is it going?

To change that, Royal BAM selected Jaggaer for spend analytics and contract management, and has since extended the platform to sourcing and supplier management across the group.

When you look at Jaggaer, it’s so configurable. It supports all of these different types of workflows that you need.

Guido Scheepens, Procurement Systems Expert at Royal BAM

The Challenge – Centralizing Procurement in a Decentralized, Conservative Industry

Ten years ago, Royal BAM was a larger company running a fragmented systems landscape, with tooling that needed to be retired and no consolidated picture of its spend. Contracts lived on paper and in email with no central repository, and most contract managers kept their own variation of the standard template.

The scale and structure of the business made this harder to solve. A construction group of Royal BAM’s size does not have one specialism: different specialisms need different workflows and different types of contracts, and different countries need different approaches to vendor onboarding. Adoption was a challenge of its own in an industry where many colleagues had been working the same way for 40 years and saw no reason to change.

To move forward, Royal BAM required technology that could:

• Consolidate spend from multiple ERP systems into a single, normalized view
• Provide a central, searchable repository for contracts
• Support many different workflows, contract types and onboarding processes in one platform
• Make the new way of working the only way of working, rather than an optional one

The Transformation – From Paper and Email to a Configurable, Group Wide Platform

Royal BAM rolled out Jaggaer step by step, starting with spend to give users something they never had before, then moving into contracts and supplier management. To drive adoption, the team integrated Jaggaer with its ERP systems so that supplier onboarding through Jaggaer became the only route to get a vendor into the ERP. Digital signing through DocuSign has replaced printed, posted and hand signed contracts. With roughly half of its contracts onboarded and a move to a single ERP system underway over the next two to three years, Royal BAM is now working with Jaggaer on a roadmap to close remaining process gaps with fewer systems and less complexity.