ATCO: Strategic Sourcing & Supply Chain Transformation

ProcureAbility is a specialist procurement and supply chain consultancy that helps organizations move from decentralized, transactional buying to integrated, strategic procurement functions. Its core offering is the Procurement Effectiveness Framework, a proprietary assessment tool that evaluates procurement processes, technology, and organizational structure to identify where a company's supply chain function stands relative to best-in-class peers.
For ATCO, an 80 year old Canada based electric and gas utility with a long history of entrepreneurial growth, this decentralized model had begun to create complexity as the organization expanded. Procurement activities were executed independently across business units, resulting in fragmented sourcing, duplicated effort, and limited enterprise-wide visibility into spend. ProcureAbility conducted a comprehensive maturity assessment, then partnered with ATCO to design and execute a multi-year transformation built around two parallel workstreams: strategic sourcing, which delivers immediate business value through category management and supplier negotiations, and organizational transformation, encompassing process redesign, technology enablement, operating model development, and change management.
The service's defining feature is its combination of diagnostic rigor and hands-on execution. ProcureAbility doesn't simply recommend a target state; it builds the processes, transfers the knowledge, and transitions ownership once capability is embedded, ensuring ATCO's team can independently sustain and scale improvements long after implementation.
The benefit to clients is a procurement function reimagined as a strategic enterprise capability rather than a transactional back-office function. Within the first year, ATCO achieved more than $100 million in incremental hard-dollar savings, stood up a new centre-led supply chain organization, and appointed its first Chief Procurement and Supply Chain Officer. The transformation also extended beyond financial performance, strengthening ATCO's commitment to Indigenous supplier participation by embedding inclusive sourcing considerations into procurement processes, resulting in increased Indigenous supplier involvement and stronger community relationships. Together, these outcomes reflect a model built for long-term scalability, one that balances financial performance, stakeholder engagement, and community impact within a single integrated program.