敖德玛赢得了第一批合同，从徐州招募

我们最近采访了Ed Cross（如图所示），他是该公司的创始人之一Odesma, the new procurement solutions firmwe first reported on a while back. Cross, with Steve Trainor and Nick Ford now form a highly experienced senior management team – all worked until last year for Xchanging, after previous successful careers in firms including PWC and NatWest.

The good news for the firm is that they are starting to win business, having created the business in early 2015. You may remember from our earlier report that they are putting forward a model that is a variant on the usual procurement consulting and outsourcing model. Odesma proposes using interim staff to give a very flexible and lower cost model compared to traditional approaches – they use the term “virtual procurement”. As they put it, they help clients create performance improvement through:

“使用采购人员云和技术合作伙伴网络部署我们的虚拟采购服务（VPS）。这是一个定制的解决方案，以显著降低的成本提供高质量采购操作的预期好处。”。

However, the biggest of their initial wins is really more traditional consulting, rather than outsourcing - they are working with a large and international firm looking at cost reduction as a priority. Cross says that Odesma won against competition from much larger and more established firms, and there is a real irony in the situation too. In order to resource the project, Odesma have recruited a number of category experts – and one source of people has been Xchanging itself!

With the recent changes there in the procurement outsourcing business, Xchanging announced that there would be some reduction in staff, and Odesma are picking up people from that source. Was there an element of schadenfreude there for the team, I asked Cross?

“一点也不，我们在Xchange仍然有很多朋友，我们希望看到他们做得很好。但随着我们的成长，现在有一些好的人在帮助我们，”他说。

The two other contracts are with smaller clients who don’t have a procurement function currently, and want help to work out how to improve procurement performance; so that means consulting initially but it could turn into service provision in time. And as Cross says “we’re bringing technology too”, through the various partners Odesma is working with such as Hubwoo,Market Dojo和任何数据Solutions.

对于敖德玛来说，现在还为时尚早，目前还不清楚他们是否会成为外包商的竞争对手(Proxima最佳的埃森哲, Xchanging itself) or the procurement consultants (4C Associates, Efficio, Future Purchasing etc) – or indeed both. My take is that it’s easier to establish a position as a consultant than an outsourcer, but we’ll see. It is a promising start for them anyway.