OURSELVES ON THE QUALITY OF OUR SERVICES”

“In addition to colocation services, Telehouse France also offers a range of managed IT solutions including connectivity, security and network services,” Hanane continues.

“We pride ourselves on the quality of our services. Telehouse is committed to upholding the highest environmental, security and corporate social responsibility standards. This is reflected through our various ISO-obtained certifications, including ISO 9001 for Quality Management System, ISO 27001, HDS and PCI DSS for Information Security and Business Continuity. Telehouse has a proven record of meeting the highest international data centre standards, so we have the full scope requested for data centres in order to operate correctly.”

When asked what sets the company apart, Hanane identifies four key factors, “Telehouse is well regarded in the industry for their connectivity, reliability, security and flexibility. We are trusted partners for companies in the business world looking to scale their IT operations, connect their business and stay competitive in an increasingly digital marketplace.”

But where does Hanane operate within these endeavours?

“I'm a member of the Executive Committee and responsible for leading finance controlling and procurement functions on our different sites. I make sure we are developing and driving the implementation of finance and procurement strategies to sustain transformation and growth at Telehouse,” she says.

5 Pillars Of Procurement Strategy

Telehouse sees procurement strategy as a roadmap to be implemented and ultimately make the business more competitive in its markets. For them, it defines how an organisation runs its procurement function, provides a governance framework and gives direction for the way the organisation intends to conduct its procurement function and activities.

Hanane elaborates, “Our procurement strategy reflects our organisation’s vision and goals to support Telehouse’s primary objectives and business strategy. Our procurement strategy is based on five key points: cost optimisation, supplier management, risk management, compliance and strategic sourcing. We aim to build strategic relationships with competitive suppliers so we can acquire necessary goods and services of the best quality, within a specific cost range and ensure they are delivered on time. As a global provider of data centres, Telehouse’s procurement strategy is designed to support the company’s growth and success. It focuses on ensuring that Telehouse can secure the goods and services needed to operate efficiently, effectively, securely and affordably.”

Technology and digitalisation are crucial to this strategy.

“Digitalisation plays a transformative role in procurement and in finance, it is reinventing these two functions,” says Hanane.

“By leveraging digital technology, we streamline our procurement and financial operations to reduce costs and improve efficiency and accuracy. By digitalising procurement, we can address current challenges and stay future proof. We have been on a journey towards digitalisation of our procureto-pay (P2P) process for several years now. This has helped us to automate some mundane tasks, accelerate purchase approval workflow, streamline certain transactions, reduce costs and processing times, mitigate the risk of error in banking transactions, free up data and improve expenses control alongside budget monitoring. Taken together, these advantages contribute to improving the technological, economic and also logistical performance of our department.

“So today and in alignment with our current business model, we are investing in new digitalisation projects as we consider it to be crucial for the success of our business.”

Driving Growth By Improving Efficiency

Underlying their digitalisation and procurement strategies, Telehouse is always looking to improve efficiency and thereby drive growth. For instance in cost optimisation, Hanane explains, “Telehouse aims to optimise costs across all areas of our procurement operations while paying particular attention to the quality. We identify opportunities in all purchasing categories by considering total cost of ownership (TCO) when analysing offers, negotiating multi-year agreements, leveraging automation and digital technology and optimising our process. We also implement short-term initiatives allowing quick wins, such as reviewing and monitoring current contracts terms, challenging technical specifications, avoiding maverick spending and challenging uncompetitive suppliers.” extension of the wider Telehouse team. We need the best partners by our side to overcome obstacles, embrace opportunities and build an exciting future. As such, we developed performance matrixes to monitor our partner compliance while also developing a robust system of analysis of our partners’ performance. We are very careful when selecting and shortlisting providers before going to do business with them because our vision for procurement at Telehouse is to become the primary customer for the best suppliers,” summarises Hanane.

Telehouse considers risk management a critical and continuous process. Appropriate risk assessments are undertaken, reviewed and managed throughout the procurement journey, so the company built a robust risk management framework to mitigate the risks associated with procurement and finance. This includes identifying potential risks, developing contingency plans and implementing measures to monitor and mitigate these different threats.

In terms of supplier management, Telehouse maintains a strong and close relationship with key partners in order to ensure that they meet company standards for quality, reliability and security.

One such supplier that Telehouse works with is Ribbon Communications.

“Ribbon Communications is one of our key partners for the Telehouse Metroconnect service,” says Hanane. “Telehouse selected them as a partner after a full market assessment. The high-performance solutions they offer convinced us to go ahead with them for our strategic connectivity projects. They are a global provider of real-time communications software and IP optical networking solutions.

“In fact, before choosing them we looked for a partner offering a high level of security and operational excellence because we must have these conditions to connect our Parisian sites, which