Since your accounting firm, lawyers, consultants and others are longstanding relationships, professional services can be a difficult area for your department leaders to identify value-creation opportunities.
Capturing value from legacy relationships
A generalist procurement approach to professional services almost always leads to disappointing outcomes. Leaders at Impendi’s Professional Services Center of Excellence know that it matters who does the work. Our understanding of your industry and its suppliers set us apart when it comes to finding and capturing value from the professional services ecosystem.
At the end of the day, it is not about hourly rates. Our Center’s experts examine if processes are in place to manage relationships professionally. For example: Is there a system in place to budget by type of work? Is there a fixed fee per activity, or is everything time and materials? Is there governance to keep spending from creeping up over time.
We are experienced enough to know that sometimes the best outcome is maintaining an existing relationship and getting more from it. In these situations, our specialized knowledge and best-practice playbook can capture value through better definition of scope, new terms for the mix of managers versus partners, or migrating from time and materials to a deliverable-based cost model.
On-the-ground assistance from professional services experts
We see these professional services challenges at hundreds of clients. That gives our Professional Services Center of Excellence the experience and credentials to not only identify options but to work side by side with your teams to benchmark current spend, check rate cards vs market, evaluate potentially disruptive new options, and review spend management processes.
Changing a professional services relationship requires careful management. Our senior leaders confront these situations with the relevant functional leaders in your organization, helping them to evaluate the risks involved with a change to a key relationship and put together a disciplined, stage-gated transition plan.
Improving the management of mission-critical relationships
A professional services engagement with us can have enduring benefits for your organization since we challenge legacy relationships and ways of doing business. If you choose, we are prepared to assist in sustaining the EBITDA impact by building your in-house professional sourcing teams, starting with an examination to find addressable gaps in your organization’s approach to professional services. We can also leverage our strong presence in India to evaluate the risks and benefits of offshoring certain professional services.
Before leaving, we will complete hands-on training to level up the procurement skills in your organization, so they are more prepared than ever to structure and manage professional services relationships.
