Corporate Excellence Awards 2020

Taking Charge Chameleon Skills is a professional performance consultancy specialising in change management. Its objectives are to enhance the personal and leadership skills of each individual and team within an organisation to be adaptable, resilient, and future fit. We recently profiled the firm and caught up with Director, Veronica Wantenaar to find our more. Since their inception, Chameleon Skills have believed that enhancing personal and leadership skills within a company leads to strong healthy organisations, which are capable of building sustainable and enabling environments where people can thrive to benefit the organisation and all its stakeholders. Going into further detail, the firm’s Director Veronica Wantenaar tells us more about the firm and its unique offering. “Here at Chameleon Skills, we utilise our EAGER methodology with all client engagements to ensure that we connect with the key stakeholders, confirm objectives, collaborate on the design, and roll out of programmes to ensure successful delivery of results and return on the investment of time and money.” Change management includes all the people-focused aspects of the organisation. “We work with people who work with people,” Veronica embellishes. The firm facilitates change and transition programmes. This can be managing the people side of any change – new technology, systems or culture transitions are successful when the people are taken through effective change processes. It also builds effective cohesive teams from top leadership down through the organisation, engaging the individuals and building the team so that it goes beyond high performing to high value. This means the team is adding value outside its own area for the benefit of the organisation through cross-functional team collaboration. Chameleon Skills also provides coaching and mentoring for individuals at all levels of the organisation. This is often for developmental purposes such as promotions, transitions into other areas of the business or it can be the role of a thinking partner. “We believe a lot of our success is our ability to connect to people and to build relationships,” Veronica continues, speaking of what it is that makes the firm different from others in a similar market. “We spend time with our clients to really get to know their business, their goals and their challenges so that we can partner with them to create programmes that will deliver the desired results.” Chameleon Skills’ clientele is predominantly medium to large organisations where long term relationships based on trust and delivery can be cultivated. Veronica and her colleagues take time to get to know their clients, connecting with the various stakeholder groups in order to develop systemic, relevant and practical solutions. In order to undertake this task successfully, the staff at Chameleon Skills are recruited based on their alignment with the firm’s core values, their skill sets and their commitment to build effective relationships and to deliver value. “Our team are an essential key to our success as we are in the people business and they are the client interface and also role models for our organisation.” Recently, the firm has seen challenges arise as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, much like other businesses have. Veronica touches a little on how Chameleon Skills fared, and is still faring, during this troubling time. Sep20741 “We were already working online but had to swiftly move over to this as our main way of working,” she says. “The biggest challenge in our industry is the number of people who call themselves coaches and have not had any proper training so are not able to provide the depth of safety and support to individuals and organisations going through change.” Chameleon Skills is now providing all of its services online or face-to- face and is expanding its systemic team capability. Veronica hopes that, by the end of 2020, the firm will be based in both South Africa and the United Kingdom through expansion. “We are passionate about the work that we do and we believe that individuals are the secret to building successful teams and organisations. We will continue to work with those organisations to provide enabling environments, where individuals can thrive and give their very best.” Contact: Veronica Wantenaar Company: Chameleon Skills cc Web Address: https://chameleonskills.com/ “We are passionate about the work that we do and we believe that individuals are the secret to building successful teams and organisations. We will continue to work with those organisations to provide enabling environments, where individuals can thrive and give their very best.” manufacturing, consumer goods, food and beverage, chemicals, agriculture, and more. To ensure that Xeeva enjoys continued success, Nina tells us what distinguishes the firm from competitors. “We recognize that data and analytics are what make a difference for organizations. Whether you’re a midsize or large company, indirect spend management has become very complex and siloed. It’s often fragmented across multiple locations, business units, categories, and thousands of suppliers – making it hard to identify and capture savings opportunities.” She continues to explain that Xeeva solves this challenge by using its patented AI technology to cleanse, categorize, and enrich spend data at line-level granularity utilizing an industry-based taxonomy. By improving the completeness and accuracy of item and supplier data, Xeeva’s customers experience up to 83% better data quality – powering smarter decisions across their organizations and allowing for successful sourcing events. “Our customers benefit from enhanced transparency and standardization of their indirect spend that significantly impacts their bottom line.” As well as a unique offering in the marketplace, Xeeva also has a team-focused internal culture that encourages transparency, openness, and communication, and allows for brainstorming and creativity to flourish in every corner of the organization. “Innovation occurs because our employees feel empowered and aren’t afraid to share their ideas and opinions. We also make sure our team never stops learning. Our employees have the ability to train in new areas, develop new skills, and get professional certifications, leading to greater knowledge for cutting-edge concepts.” Historically, procurement has been known to be slow to adopt new technologies, but with digital transformation, companies can optimize their procurement processes. Xeeva’s spend management solutions help them realize value by transforming bad spend data into actionable insights. Over the next few years, Xeeva plans to continuously improve its modelling, add to its 40 million SKUs and more than 500,000 suppliers, and keep building out the features and functionalities within its solutions. “We will look at the future needs of our customers to best assist them in surfacing new savings opportunities and making better business decisions based on their spend data.” Contact: Nina Vellayan Company: Xeeva Web Address: www.xeeva.com Data-Driven Spend Management Xeeva provides AI-powered spend management software that leverages cleansed and enriched data, allowing clients to optimize indirect spend and maximize procurement savings. We speak to Nina Vellayan about this unique offering. Xeeva is a leader in indirect spend management solutions that optimize the entire procurement process. This includes analyzing indirect spend data and surfacing savings opportunities through actionable insights and key category types. As a result, users experience 10 to 30% savings utilizing Xeeva’s supplier Marketplace to manage competitive bidding, new supplier recommendations, and new supplier engagement. Its Procure-to-Pay platform then ensures compliance across the organization, reducing spot buys and non-contract spend that can increase operational expenses and reduce profitability. President and CEO, Nina Vellayan, explains that when Xeeva was founded, its mission was to harmonize business commerce. “We have always been focused on providing maximum results to our customers,” she begins. “Over the years, our main goal hasn’t changed, but rather has evolved as Xeeva has grown and matured. Our mission and vision today are to help organizations unleash greater savings through data-driven spend management, utilizing AI technologies to surface insights, realize savings, and control indirect spend.” The XVA Platform powers the cloud-based SaaS suite consisting of: Spend Analytics, Sourcing, and Procure-to-Pay. Xeeva Spend Analytics visualizes processed, cleansed, categorized, and enriched data from Xeeva’s AI-powered XVA Platform. It enhances imperfect data with granularity down to the part number and description, providing organizations with a clear, complete picture of their spend. The Spend Analytics software surfaces savings opportunities across multiple actionable insights that deliver immediate ROI, cost savings, and best practices across the enterprise – all in a consolidated view. Savings opportunities surfaced through Xeeva Spend Analytics are seamlessly transferred to the Xeeva Sourcing platform to drive savings across all spend categories. Xeeva Sourcing is a strategic and intelligent software that recommends and engages suppliers and reduces time to contract – making competitive sourcing possible and simple without adding manual effort. Xeeva Procure-to-Pay is an intelligent procurement solution that offers a consumer-like shopping experience with full visibility, control, and management of your indirect spend. The guided buying process allows users to optimize and manage complex procurement operations and ensure best practices, compliance, and policy adherence. Finally, there is the Xeeva Marketplace, which is a comprehensive supplier network. For buyers, it delivers access to hundreds of thousands of approved vendors. For suppliers, it enables them to maintain, manage, and build buyer relationships. Nina explains: “Back in 2014 when Xeeva was founded, the company faced the challenge of positioning itself in the market. The team started its journey catering to larger automotive clients in Detroit but soon realized that indirect spend management is important across all industries globally. These challenges drove us to expand our target to multiple industries.” Xeeva has seen success with small, mid-market, and enterprise organizations alike across various industries, including automotive, Sep20359 Corporate Excellence Awards 17