Procurement strategy

Procurement is the discipline of managing your suppliers to best achieve your business objectives. It goes beyond traditional tactical purchasing activities such as ordering or receipting of goods, to focus on managing the strategic relationships with suppliers to ensure an organisation’s strategic objectives are met. Procurement remains one of the greatest areas of opportunity for all businesses to improve their bottom line. The benchmark for the impact on the bottom line is that every $1 of procurement savings is equal to an additional $10 of revenue.

We use the total cost of ownership (TCO) approach to procurement and supply chain management. Too often, companies consider only price, and forget the hidden costs – or have no way of measuring them.  We will work with you to identify and focus on total cost reduction techniques with the tools to measure TCO.  When we measure TCO we look at anything that has an impact on revenue, processes, expenditure, assets and services.  We enable clients to reduce costs, make greater savings and improve relationships with suppliers.

Our team can help you uncover that opportunity in your business by applying our expertise, experience and established processes to the specific circumstances that face your business.

We consider each of the phases in the procurement process, from identifying and selecting the opportunity area, to selecting suppliers, negotiating agreements and implementing agreed processes and supplier performance management. We address your key areas of need, and work closely with your staff to ensure on-going management of effective processes and relationships by your team, not ours.

We can demonstrate many projects that have delivered a return on investment well in excess of 500%. Our experience crosses many different industries and we have particular expertise in the following categories: fuel, advertising, recruitment, tyres, stationery, power supply, insurance, postal and courier.

Key services

We work with our clients to consider the essential components of a successful procurement strategy:

Supply chain and procurement strategy

Supply chains must constantly evolve and become more efficient for organisations to remain competitive and meet changing customer requirements. Our team offers a disciplined, detailed and methodical approach to supply chain optimisation for your organisation – from issue analysis to planning and execution. Your sourcing strategy should be based on a detailed understanding of your business needs and the strategic importance of each expenditure category. We work with you to identify strategic, non-critical and bottleneck areas, and to develop processes to effectively deal with each area.

Strategic relationship management

Based on your sourcing strategy and an understanding of the critical supply areas for your business, we help client identify appropriate levels of relationship for each supplier. Your staff can then be clear about relationship priorities and can understand the difference between trading relationships, managed relationships and strategic partnerships.

Procurement frameworks

Whether your procurement function is a team of many or exists of only an individual, we can assist in developing the frameworks for successful procurement practice. This includes writing policies and procedures and defining the guidelines that direct when you should go to market, begin tendering or develop a new partnership. We also develop spend maps by category and relationship to illustrate where focus is being and should be placed.

Strategic procurement education

We can provide a number of workshops and courses to up-skill your employees in Strategic Procurement practices. Course content ranges from Procurement Principles and Methodology to Relationship Management and How to Write an RFP.