EPC Contractors in the Oil & Gas sector are forced to improve their competitiveness and, in order to achieve this goal, they are increasingly relying on the outsourcing of activities and on lower prices of procured equipment and services. These companies are aware of the risks associated to poor quality, but when assigning orders, at times the only objective and tangible element that they have in their hands is the price.

Bonatti believes that individual EPC Contractors are able to mitigate such risk by joining forces and sharing a common platform to collect feedbacks on vendors’ supplies from a wider audience in order to rely on a performance evaluation made of an adequate number of observations.

SupplHi (www.supplhi.com) is the digital ecosystem for industrial equipment and services that fosters such sharing, to the benefit of both Buyers and Vendors. SupplHi’s vendor management platform, which was presented for the first time at the end of 2015 at ANIMP’s National Meeting, has already collected several adhesions among the main international EPC Contractors and currently boasts over 17,000 suppliers registered in a very comprehensive and detailed categorization of equipment and services.

In April 2018, during the meeting that marked the birth of ANIMP’s Package Section, Bonatti endorsed SupplHi’s launch of the Vendor Rating functionality, created to collect and share the feedbacks on vendors’ performances.

"We adopted SupplHi since its first launch, as we were and still are convinced that to be effective, even before being efficient, it is necessary to join a community-based approach towards the issues of qualification and evaluation of suppliers" says Federico Lanzini - Head of the Qualification Department and Post-Orders in Bonatti. "During these years we chose SupplHi to collect and evaluate the required data to pre-qualify our existing suppliers and to categorize the new companies that introduced themselves looking to work with us; today over 500 suppliers invited by Bonatti are registered on the platform and are visible to our buyers in all the geographies of our organization, as well as available to the SupplHi ecosystem."

"Since 2016, Bonatti’s support has been precious in driving larger adoption of SupplHi. In particular, the constant feedbacks we received from Bonatti’s Team were key in developing new functionalities of the SupplHi industry-shared digital ecosystem. In terms of Vendor Rating, we have evidence that the traditional Do It Yourself (DIY) approaches historically pursued by Buyers resulted in complex, costly and partial results. It’s now clear that sharing of information on vendors in the Energy industry represents a critical step towards a higher reliability and assurance of the entire supply chain. In fact, SupplHi is not only used by Contractors but also by End-Users, Packagers, OEMs, Components Manufacturers and Service Providers, connecting the entire industrial world – also by leveraging on user-centric digital tools and on new technologies such as the Blockchain”, says Giacomo Franchini, Director of SupplHi.

"The real added value of the shared approach will now come with a widespread adoption of the Vendor Rating tool that will make an adequate number of data points to evaluate the supplier performances available. This will enable us to have reliable average values, ​​comparisons to industry peers and indication of the trends. Vendors want to be rewarded for the higher quality they are able to deliver. I am convinced that this approach can help Vendors in general and more specifically foster the excellences of the Italian Supply Chain, making its quality more objective and less self-referenced" concludes Federico Lanzini.

During the month of October, SupplHi organized a first meeting to present and share the guidelines of the Vendor Rating Model, to which Bonatti participated together with the main Italian EPC Contractors. The current plan is to complete the Model design process by the end of 2018 and make a beta version available to the ecosystem within 1H of 2019.

Discover more:

• http://www.bonattinternational.com/suppliers