Webinar
Webinar recording: Five Strategic Projects in Three Months - How IPR is Rethinking Procurement with Tacto
How can you strategically restructure your procurement in just three months? In the webinar "How IPR is Rethinking Procurement with Tacto," Sascha Wölffle (Head of Procurement, IPR) and Simon Schaub (Customer Development, Tacto) show how IPR – Intelligente Peripherien für Roboter – transformed from manual processes to a data-driven procurement organization. The result: greater transparency, clear structures, and a procurement team that operates much more efficiently today.
The starting point – growth, complexity, and scattered information
As a medium-sized mechanical engineering company, IPR is growing steadily – with new projects, more suppliers, and increasing demands. However, this growth also brought increased complexity: data was spread across different systems, documents were maintained manually, and generating reports was time-consuming. The goal was to standardize processes, create transparency, and place a stronger focus on strategic initiatives.
The approach – five initiatives with a clear vision
To make procurement more efficient and data-driven in the long term, IPR defined five initiatives that were implemented within a few weeks – each with a significant impact on structure, transparency, and management capability.
- Supplier onboarding & self-disclosure
IPR wanted to centralize supplier information and standardize the onboarding process. Instead of scattered email communication, master data, compliance information, and documents were bundled into a uniform structure – serving as the foundation for transparency and traceability.
- Document management & compliance security
The goal was to automate the monitoring of certificates, proof of compliance, and audit documents, while ensuring they are centrally stored and version-controlled. This created a stable foundation for audits, sustainability requirements, and internal review processes.
- Supplier evaluation & performance transparency
The objective was to make performance, quality, and risk objectively comparable. By using a standardized evaluation logic, IPR was able to establish comprehensive transparency across its supplier base – and specifically identify potential for development.
- Category management & market transparency
IPR wanted to continuously analyze price and volume trends to identify market shifts early on. This transformed retrospective reviews into proactive management, enabling data-driven decisions regarding terms and volume bundling.
- AI-powered analytics & potential identification
By leveraging AI, hidden savings potential and anomalies in heterogeneous product groups became visible much faster. This provided the procurement team with new insights that were previously nearly impossible to reach through manual analysis.
These five projects laid the foundation for a procurement department that now operates in a structured and data-driven manner.
The Impact – Procurement as a Strategic Unit
The results demonstrate how IPR’s procurement department has repositioned itself in a short period of time:
- Centralized data foundation: Supplier, price, and compliance data are now consistent, up-to-date, and centrally accessible.
- Analytics at the touch of a button: Key performance indicators and trends can be evaluated in minutes—without manual maintenance or reliance on Excel.
- Stronger management: Procurement now acts as the interface between engineering, quality, and management—with clearly defined roles and reliable information.
Tacto serves as the platform where all relevant data points converge, functioning as both an operational tool and a strategic foundation.
Conclusion – From Process to Management
The IPR case study demonstrates that structural transformation in procurement is not a matter of size, but of clarity. By completing five projects in just three months, IPR shifted its procurement function from operational processing to strategic management—data-driven, transparent, and future-oriented.
In this webinar, Sascha Wölffle (IPR) and Simon Schaub (Tacto) share how this realignment was achieved, which priorities were decisive, and how IPR has established procurement as a true value driver today.
