Temporary power on a global scale
Aggreko is a world-leading provider of temporary power, heating, and cooling solutions. Operating across more than 200 countries, the company supplies critical infrastructure to events, industries, and utilities the world over.
With a global supply chain spanning thousands of suppliers, hundreds of supply categories, and dozens of languages and local regulations, managing supplier onboarding at this scale is genuinely complex. The existing approach was not keeping pace.
This is the story of how Aggreko partnered with Market Dojo to transform supplier onboarding from a rigid, manual process into a dynamic, risk-weighted, and globally scalable system.
A ‘one size fits all’ approach that didn’t fit
Global manufacturers often have complex supply chains spanning multiple geographies, thousands of suppliers, hundreds of supply categories and an equal number of internal managers across dozens of languages and local regulations.
The process for onboarding suppliers and conducting necessary due diligence must be robust yet agile enough to cater for all these nuances. However, in Aggreko’s experience, the majority of organisations follow a rigid ‘one size fits all’ process, with a central function manually applying a standard procedure. This was exactly the situation the Aggreko team found itself in—and it definitely didn’t fit.
Exposing the risks
Aggreko’s Global Supply, Quality and Performance team recognised that the existing tools weren’t mitigating risk, either with compliance or performance. Primarily, the existing software was not dynamic enough for Aggreko’s needs, given the complexity of different question sets required for different regions and risk profiles. The team was wholly reliant on manual intervention to initiate supplier onboarding and review events.
The user experience was also poor. The existing tools weren’t intuitive or simple to use, causing everything to take too long. Compounding this, it was impossible to identify where bottlenecks were occurring within the onboarding process, because the existing tool provided no data on this. A move toward a data-driven, automated approach became an urgent priority.
A question of scale
The core problem was stark: Aggreko was asking every prospective supplier the same 213 questions, regardless of whether they were a low-risk or high-risk vendor. With 15,000 suppliers in the supply chain, this was an enormous and largely unnecessary burden on both internal teams and the suppliers themselves.
“When you’ve got 15,000 suppliers in the supply chain you need to spend time where the risk is… for 30% of our suppliers we only need to ask 30-40 questions, before we were asking 213 questions regardless.”
The driving philosophy
Dynamic onboarding based on risk determines how much information you gather—don’t ask 213 questions if you can ask 10-20. That is the ethos behind the solution.
Why Market Dojo?
Testing before committing
Aggreko approached Market Dojo after evaluating the supplier onboarding functionality using the platform’s free Sandpit feature. After identifying Market Dojo as the right partner for this joint project, the team built a business case for change that addressed how to engage with the required internal stakeholders.
A vital component for the 200+ stakeholders involved was the successful migration of existing supplier data into the new platform, while maintaining the existing logic and rules for compliance. Early in the project, Aggreko and the Market Dojo development team ran migration tests to give stakeholders confidence that the full data set would transfer correctly. This level of collaboration became a common thread throughout the project.
Ultimately, a six-month development project was initiated to design, build, and launch a dynamic supplier onboarding solution that would automatically tailor the onboarding process based on a weighted risk profile for each supplier.
What is dynamic supplier onboarding?
Unlike many standard processes, Market Dojo’s Supplier Onboarding solution automatically tailors the onboarding process based on a weighted risk profile for each supplier. A high-risk supplier—determined by their geography, supply category, and spend value—would be automatically required to complete a thorough online evaluation and be assessed by multiple local, regional, and global approvers from across the business, potentially in parallel. A low-risk supplier, by contrast, would face only a basic questionnaire and a sole approver.
Using the same logic, the solution automatically determines the appropriate local and central approval workflow from 100 different options required to vet the supplier. Built-in escalation workflows handle cases where any given approver requests their line manager to step in.
Multi-language support at scale
A critical requirement was that Aggreko’s supplier questionnaires could be viewed in 23 different languages, maintained as a single version so that any new legislative changes only needed to be applied once to the original template.
“It is vitally important to the business that regions are able to onboard their local supply chain in the relevant language. We support 23 different languages not only in the tool UX, but in the dozen or so supplier questionnaires, which the system is clever enough to enable us to maintain on an ongoing basis.”
With Supplier Onboarding, the entire process and online evaluations can be completed in dozens of different languages, from both a buyer and supplier perspective, all using the same questionnaire to maintain compliance and data uniformity.
The impact of Market Dojo
Rapid migration at scale
Given the extent and complexity of this project, the benefits became evident quickly.
“Within months, we migrated 8,500 existing suppliers and onboarded 3,000 new ones. We also migrated 55,000 documents which provided comfort to stakeholders in knowing that they hadn’t lost the last four years of work.”
Aggreko is now able to onboard new suppliers within two days in most cases and, for more complex suppliers, no more than 20 days. On average, this represents a 70% reduction in time spent onboarding suppliers, evidenced in their responsive reporting dashboards powered by Microsoft Power BI via API.
A genuine business success
Aggreko’s previous onboarding process consisted of over 200 questions sent to every prospective supplier. Today, that question set has been reduced to just 30-40 questions for the majority of suppliers, generating enormous time and efficiency savings across 250+ stakeholders in procurement, finance, HSE, compliance, and quality—as well as across the 8,000+ active suppliers.
This has become a genuine business success, not just a procurement improvement.
Roll-out on a large scale
Technical functionality is only part of the story when it comes to ensuring a successful roll-out. Market Dojo migrated over 55,000 documents and 5,000+ suppliers’ information from the previous solution. Each question had to be individually mapped and tested for backward compatibility.
To ensure a smooth launch and high adoption rates, Market Dojo delivered training to all users across multiple time zones within two weeks. A live chat feature is embedded directly in the tool, enabling any buyer, approver, or supplier to access real-time technical support.
The new system has been rolled out to 152 countries, across 12 regions, in 23 languages. The initial training sessions provided by Market Dojo were delivered immaculately and the online support and video training is an absolute game changer.
A great experience, all in
The team at Aggreko concluded with a clear verdict on both the technology and the partnership.
“The capability of Market Dojo’s development team is the best I’ve ever worked with. Amazing!”
“It’s an absolute pleasure to see this project be such a success. All in all, it’s been a great experience.”
The Aggreko project demonstrates what is possible when a technology partner is genuinely willing to co-develop a solution to meet complex, real-world requirements—delivering measurable savings, high adoption, and business-wide confidence in the process.
And lastly…
Would Aggreko recommend Market Dojo?