Our Strategic Procurement Planning process enables you to chart an effective path to savings based on in-depth cross-functional alignment and an unwavering focus on your overall business strategy.

Our four-step approach begins with budget and target-setting, including the establishment of quarterly and annual budgets, an annual procurement savings target, and periodic updates to quarterly budgets as needed.

Defining the operating plan entails setting category strategies and savings targets, and setting and revising Sourcing and Program calendars.

Executing the operating plan encompasses a review of category and supplier performance, a review of property implementation, and collecting customer feedback.

This enables you to track and validate EBITDA impact, as well as reconcile shortfalls, book a realized EBITDA impact each quarter, revise the budget as needed, and review results with leadership.

We work with you to ensure that corporate finance, program management, and strategic sourcing remain aligned and work together on a structured program to reach the  desired end state. And we create the right metrics and dashboards so you can easily monitor the program at a high level and drill down as needed to explore action items and the key components of each metric.

Buy Better + Spend Better is our unique approach to procurement, providing a one-two punch to drive significant savings.

Buy Better is a supply-led effort that focuses on price and volume allocation, negotiating prices and terms, managing price risks, pooling volumes and contracts, shifting volumes to best-price suppliers and leveraging procurement networks.

Spend Better is an operations-led effort to control demand, enforce compliance, reduce complexity, perform value engineering, address make-versus-buy decisions and take related steps to foster efficient spending.

Buy Better + Spend Better does more than just reduce costs. It elevates your procurement function by also reducing supply chain risk, supporting continuous quality and service improvement, fostering better decision-making about suppliers, optimizing resource allocation, and more. It enables you to clearly define category segmentation and strategy, and it’s supported by a detailed analysis of your spending, including Spend Cube, which creates a detailed taxonomy that enables you to slice and dice your spending and discover many hidden opportunities for savings. 

The goal of a closed-loop savings process is straightforward: Make sure the savings captured by superior procurement practices show up on the P&L.

It begins with a diligent and robust management of individual spend reduction initiatives. Those savings are then aggregated and allocated to specific accounts and/or P&Ls. From there, savings are incorporated into financial planning and forecasts.

Successfully implementing such a program demands, among other things, rigorous reporting and clear visibility into savings. We work with you to ensure that heads of procurement, financial planning, and accounting, as well as budget owners, all see the same numbers. When savings are booked, they reduce budgets accordingly. That enables senior leaders to decide how to best use the savings, be it to close budget gaps, fund new investments or boost the bottom line.

A closed loop systems is a great way to track and capture the gains from your procurement efforts, and use them to invest in your priorities.

Take your procurement function to an entirely new level of performance by building a range of discrete competencies that can support a world-class operating model.

We work with you and your team to develop the strategic and operational capabilities you need to manage supplier relationships, develop comprehensive category strategies, and master critical processes, including source-to-contract and procure-to-pay.

We also offer Procurement University, a structured program of training that uses external experts (Phase I) to impart skills and knowledge to your internal trainers (Phase II) who train and work with skills specialists to continuously improve your procurement function. This program builds category management core skills, procurement soft skills (negotiations, supplier management) and procurement technical skills (processes, systems, tools and data analytics). 

And, our Results360^SM change management approach can inject additional training, tools and support, ensuring that your procurement team doesn’t simply learn new skills but develops a high-performance culture that enhances performance for years to come.

As companies continue to embrace digital capabilities across their operations, Chief Procurement Officers face two critical questions: How can they use digital to transform the procurement function? And, what can their function do to enable the company’s broader digital vision?

We see three trends influencing procurement’s digital future. The first is the increasing use of automation and Agile development to increase the speed, efficiency and accuracy of operational processes. The second is the deployment of key technologies to foster frictionless collaboration, improving supplier performance and accelerating cycle times. The third involves the use of digital tools to optimize procurement spend, forecasting, category management, and speed to market.

At a more granular level, there are nearly two dozen digital tools that can help propel your performance across those three trends. With so many option, determining your priorities is a critical first step. We can help you chart the right course toward digital innovation, beginning with our Enterprise Digital Readiness Diagnostic and progressing through a structured program to generate significant, sustained value from your digital strategy. And we support those efforts by partnering with best-of-breed software companies that are developing the most innovative procurement capabilities in the market.