Working closely with Finance teams we gathered supplier and spend data from transactions management systems, and created a bespoke Spend Cube which incorporated a custom Procurement category coding structure. We created data extracts for completion, correction, enhancement, and validation by each Department, and updated the Spend Cube accordingly.

Analysis of the £95M annual spend, 138K lines of transactions data, and 4,000 unique suppliers resulted in £55M of spend being determined as in-scope with £38M being addressable.

We interviewed more than 20 key business stakeholders including Department Heads and operations staff to form a comprehensive view of the organisation, it’s objectives, unique and common challenges, and opportunities which had not been materialised.

Our findings spanned multiple areas of concern including :

• Over-reliance on tacit knowledge due to incomplete and under-utilised master data and repositories

• Inefficiencies and productivity issues as a result of inconsistent ways of working and under-utilised systems

• Minimal strategic Procurement within individual business units and almost entirely lacking at the enterprise level

• Heightened risk of business disruption due to an over-reliance on-relationships rather than formal supplier management, processes and data including contracts, performance KPIs and active monitoring of critical/important suppliers

• Loss of cost reduction opportunities arising from fragmented expenditures and a lack of cross-company leverage

• Use of Purchase-to-Pay systems as a means to an end, rather than as core business management and insights tools

• Under-developed policies compared to current best practice

• Lack of sufficiently detailed spend-budget tracking information with operations departments

• Insufficient resources and capabilities to drive ley projects forwards to create additional value