The Impendi Approach
The Impendi customer-centric approach transforms data and strategic sourcing processes, so you find, get, and keep value from your supply chain at an accelerated pace.
Impendi’s Find-Get-Keep Approach to the Savings Lifecycle
Unlike pure consulting firms or packaged software solutions, we are a hybrid resource of category-domain experts and transformative analytics built to deliver a tailored procurement value capture solution and leave your enterprise more capable of managing the savings lifecycle.
What do we mean customer-centric?
Every Impendi engagement starts with an examination of the unique strategic sourcing challenges and opportunities faced by your enterprise. We use these insights to design an executional approach that activates the right set of best-practice capabilities to meet procurement’s business objectives including improved EBITDA performance, reduced supply risk, and improved cash flow.
Our playbook is finely tuned for flexibility. The technology allows domain experts to do affordable, AI-enabled customization of your data assets, so they reflect the nuances of your enterprise. In surprisingly short cycle-time, Impendi delivers a seamless, end-to-end analytics system to guide decision making through all stages of the procurement savings lifecycle.
Find
Impendi, uniquely, employs a client-customized spend taxonomy and classification rules so that opportunities for increasing value are driven by the data, not the other way around. By investigating addressable spend by vendor, category, under contract, and under management our domain experts categorize your spend with more granularity and greater accuracy than any pre-packaged software or procurement consultant.
Impendi’s experts then go beyond the data, using their category and domain experience to understand how your organization buys, examining tail spend, contract compliance, payment terms, and sourcing practices to reveal procurement process maturity within the departments of your enterprise. With the added clarity, our Procurement Analytics experts will find hidden opportunities and actionable guidance.
Get
Unlike most approaches to capturing the identified savings, Impendi’s hands-on senior leaders meld with your function leadership and category managers to stand a rigorous Project Management Office with stage-gated decision-making process supported by spend tracking tailored to your business.
Workflow tools like the Projected Savings Forecast provide project pipeline visibility and timeliness of savings to your category managers and other stakeholders. Impendi is hands-on helping your teams to set up monitoring for buying processes, contract compliance, actual spend, contract negotiations that will highlight delays and at-risk projects for escalation—all to ensure that identified opportunities can be “taken to the bank.”
Keep
Assistance from consulting firms or software applications seldom goes beyond new contract execution, leaving it to you to track variance to savings targets. Not surprisingly, Industry studies reveal that the majority of procurement savings are lost within 24 months.
When we exit, Impendi leaves a new playbook for your procurement staff, so negotiated savings are retained and process improvements stick. Furthermore, Impendi delivers a transactional data feed, organization building and hands-on training to give your teams unprecedented ability to detect variances, pinpoint root causes, and develop remediation plans to prevent leakage, even claw back savings, due to non-compliance with contractual terms, overcharges, unapproved items and missed rebates.
The Find-Get-Keep Cycle is supported by these six capability platforms
Six executional capabilities in our services arsenal assure private equity firms and other complex organizations that they will get what is promised from an Impendi engagement. While some consulting firms possess a subset of these capabilities, no one possesses all of them to the extent that we do.
1. Industry and category leaders with operating experience
Some procurement services providers drop a playbook and someone into your supply chain network with no experience dealing with the vendors in your space or your mission-critical partnerships. Their un-tried recommendations are left to your organization to negotiate, contract, and capture.
By contrast, Impendi engagement leaders are operators who have led supply chain transformations at leading-edge companies like AT&T, Dell, HPE, Starbucks and T-Mobile and had to live with the results. It matters who is evaluating opportunities, anticipating problems, assessing benefits and associated risks to your ongoing operations. We stand by your team, helping to negotiate the deal, write the contract, and monitor compliance at a best-practice level.
Many spend categories require specialized expertise to move the needle on EBITDA. That is why Impendi’s most experienced leaders head Centers of Excellence in Technology , Logistics, Facilities, Human Resources and Benefits and Marketing. Impendi has deep experience across a broad range of industries, giving the engagement a leg up on sensing opportunities that transcend the known options.
Bottom line, your Impendi engagement leader is a ‘doer’ obsessed with and measured on their ability to capture savings and create value in the supply chain. Having deep operating expertise in your corner ensures that more value creating opportunities are identified and captured.
2. Trusted analytics platform
Common approaches to strategic sourcing and procurement make frustratingly slow progress moving beyond high-level categorization for their direct and indirect spend. Category managers waste time cleaning up bad data, eventually losing faith that their performance has been accurately measured.
Using a hybrid approach of AI-based spend categorizations curated by industry-category experts, Impendi’s analytics are unlike anything you have seen before. Drawing upon decades of experience delivering for Private Equity, $3TN in spend analyzed across 300+ companies, we consistently deliver a detailed spend taxonomy that reflects the nuances of your business and data accuracy that leads to the detection of hidden savings opportunities.
Impendi’s spend analytics generate more impact in faster cycle time because our technology solution has embedded flexibility for both data intake and data visualization. We deploy this agile feature to enrich data with external tools and make rapid, affordable customizations that tailor procurement insights to your industry- and firm-specific challenges.
Impendi is the first company to offer an end-to-end analytics suite, so you gain visibility into the full procurement savings lifecycle. Dashboards integrate the in-depth sourcing knowledge of our senior experts and are tailored to the needs of executives along with category managers and leads where savings are found, captured, and kept.
3. Transparent governance among all organizational stakeholders
Sourcing consultants who focus on a single level of governance—the executive report—and do not implement clear performance metrics across the entire stakeholder group, inject ambiguity and mistrust about the actual value delivered.
By contrast, Impendi’s 3-level governance operates with unique transparency and clarity at all stages of your journey through the entire engagement. Level 1 pairs off your functional leaders with ours so they work in tandem on identified projects. Our senior leadership partners with the CFO, our engagement managers with department VPs, our analysts with your analysts. The structure offers multiple touchpoints for providing candid feedback on project progress.
Levels 2 involves biweekly reviews by the PMO of actions, owners, dates, and dollars via a disciplined stage-gated process that reviews project metrics like spend coverage addressed; richness of spend granularity and context; stakeholder input on contracts, PQ visibility, invoices, benchmarks, and defined tail; and savings variance monitoring.
Level 3 governance provides an executive readout, where project issues have been addressed rather than allowed to fester into roadblocks. This metrics-driven approach allows our engagement team to see their recommendations through to the end, all while building organization capabilities among your stakeholders so they adopt best-practice approaches going-forward.
4. Organizational build of the strategic sourcing function
Strategic sourcing engagements that end without shoring up skill sets in the procurement organization leave an enterprise exposed to backtracking and recycling sub-optimal processes of the past. Bearing in mind the full procurement savings life cycle, Impendi functions as a transformation partner to amplify your strategic sourcing capabilities so that gains are sustained and expanded upon.
Impendi is prepared to serve as a force multiplier to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your strategic sourcing function. We begin by identifying where your organization is on the maturity curve. For established organizations, we develop action plans to embed new policies, update procurement systems-controls, introduce competitive bid environments or resolve governance issues.
For less mature organizations, we help to design, hire and train up the function with core competencies of our services arsenal so it can stand on its own after we are gone.
The point is to leave your sourcing and procurement function prepared to execute on newly established outcome-based structures and monitoring systems.
5. Integrating ESG values into supply chain practices
Consultants can provide advice on strategic sourcing, spend analytics or procurement organization strategy, but often without addressing environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards. Those who do, lack an understanding about the emerging vendor landscape or how to lend support in ways that change organization buying habits.
As a veteran-owned business founded on ESG values, Impendi has supportive executional infrastructure and is prepared to assist with the integration of ESG standards and goals into supply chain decision making and category strategies. Our curated Supplier Diversity Dashboard delivers instant visibility into diversity spend, tailored to your goals and our category leaders understand the best sources for adding supplier diversity while minimizing risk to the business.
Our spend databases and supplier intelligence partnerships equip us to provide in-depth ESG insights to enhance incumbent supplier relationships, widen the net to introduce new vendors, design values-driven processes, and identify global regulatory and industry requirements. Impendi will establish industry leading ESG-driven KPIs, train procurement teams, and track their compliance to make sure that the values are embedded into your organization’s procurement DNA.
Finally, we align ESG values with financial returns through triple bottom line evaluations, a comparatively novel offering since few providers offer the full range of ESG executional capabilities.
6. Supporting supply chain resiliency
Recent supply chain vulnerabilities highlight that strategic sourcing needs to extend beyond securing cost savings to increasing supply chain resiliency and reducing disruption risks that can adversely impact revenue growth and operating cost trajectories.
Increasingly, clients have asked us to look for improvement opportunities across the entire integrated supply chain, not just its procurement elements. As a direct result of COVID-19, environmental disasters, government policy changes and more, our focus has shifted to building out and amplifying sourcing capabilities around a new set of rules designed to compete effectively in a more turbulent landscape.
Impendi’s senior leaders include executives who have successfully run supply chain operations and integrated supply chain insights into a sourcing strategy that de-risks supply chains by diversifying suppliers and enhancing the resiliency of key vendors. Each of our expense category Centers of Excellence are today executing engagements that enhance supply chain reliability and offer powerful carriers of learning for other enterprises.