ASCERTAIN
We highlight areas for improvement and in partnership with our clients, we create a procurement vision producing a realistic action plan for the goals to be realised.
Sourcing Audits and Opportunity Assessment
A recommended first step in the improvement and development of a client’s purchasing function is to carry out a quick review and prioritise those areas of procurement that should be addressed. Depending on the client’s determinations, we offer various arrangements: a single diagnosis Sourcing Audit, is done in about 2 weeks while a more thorough Opportunity Assessment will take 8-10 weeks. Selected deliverables in an Opportunity Assessment can be spend analysis, contract review, vendor market analysis, and priority purchasing categories. Staff evaluations can also be an important part of an assessment and incorporated, if required.
Purchasing: Spend Analysis, Contract Analysis & Creation
After an in-depth review to gain understanding about your company’s purchasing and procurement programs, process, and track record, our consultants will present a thorough, focused analysis of your current pain points and purchasing spend profile history.
By obtaining both your input and the input of your procurement associates, our consultants will facilitate and build internal support before moving forward to the next phase of each initiative. We will work to build trust and teamwork between your purchasing and procurement associates.
Our consultants are also experienced at looking at contract practices and helping clients develop a powerful approach to contract management through a combination of the following services:
- Contract Inventory Assessment : We conduct a thorough analysis of your contract inventory
- Agreement Development Process: We outline your business’s agreement process and benchmark it against industry best practices.
- Pro-Forma Agreements: We work with your legal team to create a series of easy-to -understand pro-forma contract documents.
Our purchasing consulting service and process is flexible and can be re-focused due to current priorities or business requirements without issue. We are responsive to change and can alter direction very quickly to meet your needs.
Cost reduction
Procurement should be a profit centre for your company. Our cost reduction specialists use tested cost reduction techniques, strategies and tactics. Starting by identifying your top expense areas, we will review current contracts, vendors and products to identify where your company’s best opportunities for reducing cost are.
Reducing costs to meet or exceed budget should be part of company’s continual improvement mindset. Many times, associates have great cost reduction ideas that simply haven’t been mined or shared. Our cost reduction specialists will help you to create the environment where listening and timely idea development and implementation will build your team’s enthusiasm and involvement.
Listening is one the most effective tools of our cost reduction consultants. We will listen to you, your associates and your vendors to identify, develop and harvest low hanging fruit. Mentoring, celebrating successes and the sharing of ideas that become actionable cost reduction initiatives is a great way to get your team involved and even in friendly competition and partnering to strengthen your company’s bottom line.
Effective business cost reduction strategies will produce measurable, long-term results. The main areas of expenditure on which we work tend to be indirect costs. This is because, in our experience, these often have the greatest potential for cost reduction. However we also frequently identify savings from clients’ direct inputs.
Examples of categories that we address include:
- accommodation
- banking
- catering
- cleaning
- fuel
- general stationery
- insurance
- IT
- leasing/financing
- marketing
- merchant card fees
- packaging
- photocopying/reproduction
- plant hire (FLTs, skips, cranes)
- postage and couriers
- print/printing
- professional fees (audit, legal)
- protective clothing/equipment
- recruitment
- rent and rates
- road freight
- security
- telecoms (fixed line and mobile)
- training
- travel
- tyres
- uniforms
- utilities (electricity, water, gas)
- vehicle hire and maintenace
This list is not exhaustive. We consider any areas of expenditure except wages and salaries.
Cost reduction: billing scheme
We bill entirely on a contingency basis. The exercise is therefore fully self-financing and does not need a budget in the way that most investment does.
Level of billing: our fees are 50% of savings identified in the ‘relevant period’. In the majority of cases, the relevant period is the first year following delivery of results.
Timing: half of this fee is payable on delivery of results; the balance is payable over the relevant period. In this way we spread the cost of our assignment – if any – over the period to which the cost reduction that we have identified relates.
Basis of savings: our contract clearly defines savings. This prevents disagreement or confusion over billing.
We base our calculation of savings on actual expenditure in the last 12 months, adjusted to take into account any known factors not related to the assignment that would otherwise have affected that expenditure.
We support all invoices with detailed and clearly set-out calculations identifying the savings that we have generated. Most are empirically provable.
