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6. Key Enablers:

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Our supply chain expertise is supported by a number of complementary capabilities that ensure you get teh best results possible.

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We embed the right digital technologies at key points along the supply chain. Smart automation, for example, can help you accelerate your operational processes while increasing flexibility and the ability to customize.

 

End-to-end visibility and collaboration, including with 3PLs, can boost responsiveness, improve operational planning, and facilitate superior tracing of products and input materials. Advanced R&D management, planning and forecasting capabilities and a host of tools and technologies that make employees more productive are also important parts of our digital portfolio.

 

We'll help you address essential organizational elements of an effective supply chain, including what level of centralization makes sense and what forms of decision-making, governance and related ways of working will ensure that your supply chain meets its full potential.

 

Sustainability is also critically important. We can help you define your sustainability ambition and make a strong business case for sustainability, one that addresses cost reduction, commercial opportunity, risk mitigation, recruitment, or some combination of all four. 

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Procurement:

 

World-class procurement organizations can reduce a company's purchasing cost base by an average of 8%–12% and deliver additional annual savings of 2%–3%. We work closely with your team to identify and realize savings across all spend categories and procurement levers, and we build your organizational capabilities so you can sustain those gains over the long term. 

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1. Strategic Procurement Planning:

 

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.

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

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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.

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2.  Buy & Spend Better:

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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. 

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3.  Closed-loop Savings Capture: 

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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.

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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.

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

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4.  Capability Building:

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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.

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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 Results360SM 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.

 

5.  Digital Foundation and Enablers:

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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?

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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.

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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

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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.

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Service Operations & Support Functions:

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We specialize in designing and developing efficient and effective customer service operations that support customer acquisition, retention, cost management and profitability. We combine deep expertise in advanced analytics with superior design capabilities to move quickly from prototype to full-scale deployment. We’ve helped hundreds of companies solve a multitude of service-related problems, including reducing unnecessary work volumes, improving first-time rates, placing the right person with the right job, reshaping capacity requirements, developing staffing models, radically redesigning for fast and flawless episodes, and more.

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Go beyond efficiency to act as effective, valued business partners.  We partner with IT, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Real Estate & Facilities Management and other functions to improve quality, speed, and cost, so that your support functions provide an advantage over the competition.

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We help you quickly identify the sources of value, develop a plan of achievable initiatives, turn that plan into action, and sustain the results. 

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We bring a full range of capabilities, including zero-based redesign, shared services, and capability sourcing, to help you achieve your goals. Vector, our integrated digital delivery platform, provides the advanced analytics and automation expertise that will help your support functions get more value from technology. 

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1. Finance Function Advantage:

 

Build a world-class finance function that ticks all the boxes: superior service, strong controls and lower cost. Spend more time on higher-value, forward-looking activities and less on accounting and transactional tasks.

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• Better stakeholder experience:  Deliver higher quality decision support, analytics, and services to the business and stakeholders

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• Higher Quality:  Provide more accurate and effective finance processes with stronger controls

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• Lower Costs: Reduce costs by more than 20% through standardization, centralization and automatio

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• Enhanced Talent Strategy:  Reskill your team to focus on higher value added activities

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Powerful forces—including regulatory change, activist investors, and technologies like AI and automation—are putting substantial pressure on CFOs and their finance teams.  

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We partner with you to quickly identify sources of value, develop a plan of achievable initiatives, turn that plan into action, and sustain the results.  

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Here’s how it works. We start by ensuring your finance policies, processes, organization, and systems are aligned to your business strategy. Then, we bring a full range of capabilities, including operating model redesign, process redesign, shared services, outsourcing and offshoring, to help you achieve your goals. Throughout the process, Vector, our integrated digital delivery platform, provides advanced analytics and automation expertise. 

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To sustain your results over the long-term, we’ll also address the critical talent and change management activities so essential to building an extraordinary finance team. and fostering the necessary culture and behavior changes.

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2.   HR Function Advantage:

 

Demographics, new talent expectations, alternative work arrangements and digital technologies are just some of the factors forcing HR to fundamentally change how it operates--internally and with the business. We’ll help you transform.

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• Improved Business Outcomes:  More effectively recruit, develop, and retain talent to improve business results

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• Better Employee Experience:  Improve your employee satisfaction and employee Net Promoter scores

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• Higher Quality: Deliver HR services more accurately and embed new digital capabilities

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• Lower Costs:  Improve HR efficiency through shared services and automation

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Big changes, both in the workforce and the workplace, are rewriting the rules for CHROs and their teams.  As a result, every HR discipline, from talent acquisition to talent management to total rewards, is evolving. 

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We can help you quickly identify sources of value, develop a plan to capture that value, execute on the required initiatives, and sustain the results.  We start by ensuring your HR policies, processes, organization, and systems are aligned to your business strategy.  We bring a full range of capabilities, including operating model redesign, process redesign, shared services, outsourcing and offshoring, to help you reach your goals. Vector, our integrated digital delivery platform, provides powerful advanced analytics and automation expertise.

 

We also help you address the talent issues so critical to building a world-class HR team, while our Results360SM approach to change management ensures that you embed the culture and behavioral changes necessary to sustained success.

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3.  Enterprise Technology:

 

We believe that a company’s corporate strategy both guides and is influenced by its technology strategy. No matter what your starting point, we can help you determine what technological capabilities, systems and people you need to succeed. We provide end-to-end expertise that addresses every element of your evolving technology infrastructure, from developing a transformation roadmap to system migration, workforce training and more. 

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Our Enterprise Technology expertise enables you to:

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• Align your technology strategy with your business ambition and chart your digital transformation

• Modernize your systems and architecture, with a detailed roadmap grounded in your unique needs

• Embrace modern operating models and Agile methods to increase productivity, quality and efficiency

• Implement a virtuous and dependable funding model

• Achieve your most ambitious technology transformation goals with Delivery Assurance

• Make technology a source of M&A success

• Plan a migration strategy with confidence, while mitigating risks

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Ways we can help:

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• Technology & Data Strategy: Your technology strategy should be a logical extension of your business strategy. With an eye on costs and  cutting-edge innovation, we'll help you align your people and systems around a bold technology transformation.

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• Technology Operation Model: Your people are central to your technology strategy. We'll help you maximize their contributions through Agile delivery models as you refine product management, governance and organizational structure.

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• Technology Cost Management: The costs of digitalization are pushing technology budgets up, both in absolute dollars and as a share of operating expenses. We'll help you adopt cost management practices that eliminate waste and propel your strategy.

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• Technology Delivery Assurance: Gain a new level of confidence that your large-scale tech transformation projects will succeed. Our structured approach helps you anticipate issues, mitigate risks, and make the right decisions to achieve your goals.

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• Systems & Architecture: Digital transformation puts entirely new demands and expectations on your systems and architecture. We’ll help you modernize your entire technology stack to become a true technology-enabled leader.

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4.   Capability Outsourcing:

 

Outsourcing and offshoring are at a turning point.  Growth in as-a-service models, disruptive technologies such as cloud and automation, and new data security and privacy standards are a few of the forces disrupting traditional approaches to sourcing.  We can help you navigate these forces and enhance your competitive position.

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• Lower Cost:  Reduce costs through scale and global delivery

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• Improved Service Quality:  Standardize, simplify and automate processes

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• Flexibility & New Capabilities: Scale services up or down more quickly and gain access to new capabilities you currently lack

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• New Sources of Talent:  Tap into a more diverse and wider talent pool​

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