There are several customizable ways to engage Impendi’s strategic sourcing capabilities
To make sure that the engagement model is the best fit for your organization, we start with intensive listening with stakeholders in your supply chain community until we gain an imaginative understanding of your business needs. We call this pre-proposal check-in ‘Impendi Canvass’.
Impendi Canvass
The exploratory Canvass interviews with key supply chain players reveal, sometimes surprising, insights about the procurement value capture opportunities and a best-practice design for the engagement. Originally executed for private equity portfolio managers, Canvass offers a unique, 360-degree perspective that raises the probability of success and ROI for the engagement.
Read more about Canvass
The pre-proposal Canvass for your enterprise will be unique to your customer and supplier community. Before kicking off, an Impendi engagement leader will work with your project team to assemble a slate of stakeholders for these encounters, drawing from:
- Executives from a parent enterprise or private equity sponsor
- C-suite executives responsible for driving EBITDA improvements
- Procurement functional leaders and their implementation teams
- Executives who manage the enterprise P&Ls
- Department heads in accounts payable and other functions
- Selective sample of suppliers and downstream customers
These structured conversations focus on the end-state goals, common obstacles the stakeholders encounter, what they perceive is changing in the environment, their view of supply chain threats and opportunities, and what they feel are the greatest opportunities for value capture.
We then assemble a cross-discipline team of Impendi experts with experience in your industry to review the Canvass insights and perform a preliminary assessment about the opportunities, challenges, process maturity, and organizational talent for the strategic sourcing initiative.
Even though your engagement may ultimately follow an established strategic sourcing playbook, we start with an open mind, using Canvass-generated insights to define a process solution designed to move stakeholders from their baseline challenges and opportunities to an improved future state.
Impendi Analytics engagements fit your business needs, not ours.
Spend Diagnostic
At the outset of an initiative to reduce costs and raise the organization’s strategic sourcing capabilities, you may be asking:
- Do I need this product or service?
- Is it the right specification for what I need?
- Is the price right for the specification/volumes quoted?
- Am I buying from a preferred supplier under a defined contract?
- Am I being billed correctly?
To de-risk and accelerate progress toward their savings goals, Impendi is equipped to take a hands-on approach, guiding the quick and systematic identification of procurement savings opportunities. The Spend Diagnostic design follows a best-practice methodology to collect evidence and build support for a collection of vetted savings hypotheses and typically includes the following steps:
- Categorize and review historical spending practices
- Assess key vendor contract terms, pricing, and volume
- Provide granular benchmarking for key suppliers and categories
- Identify billing inconsistencies due to supplier fragmentation, consolidation, etc.
- Conduct structured interviews to create background and context
- Leverage our category experts to articulate detailed savings hypotheses
- Validate hypotheses with data and your content experts
At the conclusion of the Spend Diagnostic, usually 6-8 weeks, Impendi will deliver a diagnostic report organizing opportunities by size of savings, complexity, time to implement etc. along with a realistic implementation plan. Separately, we will make recommendations related to upskilling the organization and deploying best-in-class tools to sustain the savings after project implementation.
Procurement Analytics
Impendi makes our growing suite of highly customizable procurement analytics solutions available to support your strategic sourcing and procurement processes. Procurement Analytics brings a difference-making blend of AI-enabled data analytics together with the know-how gained from hundreds of cost savings initiatives.
We begin with understanding your business systems so that we can fit (not force) them to the analytics design. Custom taxonomy and classification rulesets are synchronized with supplemental data sources until we have complete, accurate, and detailed visibility into your organization’s spend and cost reduction opportunities.
Unlike other procurement solutions, we don’t stop there. Our Realized Savings Tracker quantifies savings realized over time compared to what was forecasted. When savings deviate, Impendi tools automate the reconciliation process between contractual terms and purchasing activity so you can identify the root cause of the problem and take corrective action.
Our best-in-class Cash Release Analytics helps gain visibility and control over working capital. Built-in algorithms improve cash flow management by detecting early supplier payments, missed discounts, non-compliant payment terms, and opportunities to eliminate excess, unproductive, and obsolescent inventory.
Saving Acceleration
After a Spend Diagnositc, this often-used project will rapidly pursue the identified value capture opportunities. Implementation teams are led by Impendi senior leaders with extensive operating expertise in your industry. At the conclusion of the engagement, Impendi senior experts will work with you to close organizational gaps that keep the momentum going.
The process begins with a 4–8-week diagnostic to identify the value available to be captured from sourcing-procurement activities. Post diagnostic, implementation teams are led by Impendi senior leaders with extensive operating expertise in your industry. The entire engagement, including implementation, typically takes 4-8 months to execute the work.
Procurement Transformations
For situations in which the procurement function is immature, missing entirely, or in need of cultural change to unlock value, Impendi may be engaged by its sponsors in a longer term project to help transform procurement into a strategic value-added function.
Following an assessment of procurement organization and process maturity, Impendi repairs, rebuilds, and transforms capabilities by doing the work alongside client teams. Midway through a project, Impendi will begin building the sustaining organization by performing intellectual property transfer, process redesign, systems changes and organization building.
Private Equity Portfolio Services
Impendi Analytics is a leading partner with private equity enterprises and their portfolio companies. These engagements utilize our entire suite of strategic procurement services and often involve co-development of intellectual property so that the work is tailored to specific outcomes and timelines. Hundreds of completed engagements fall into four general categories:
Deal Due Diligence.These engagements, support private equity and other internal deal-making resources to size the procurement opportunities during pre-deal due diligence or post-deal synergy planning. Typically, within a few days, Impendi builds category visibility and benchmark savings potential based on a light layer of technology and our past project experience.
Cross-Portfolio Spend Analysis. We rapidly and efficiently aggregate spend across the portfolio, normalize suppliers, and categorize spend to a custom hierarchy that supports leveraged purchasing, internal benchmarking, and increased collaboration. The spend analysis can be structured as a one-time or recurring activity.
Value Capture Analytics. Typically used during cost reduction engagements and provided as a “leave behind”, this unique suite of analytics is designed to help portfolio companies find, get, and keep more savings. The suite includes: Impendi Spend Analytics, Savings Program Analytics, Realized Savings Tracker, and Contract Compliance Analytics.
Portfolio Company Spend Analytics. Impendi works with individual portfolio companies to provide a custom spend analytics solution that leverages all their data assets to consolidate, cleanse, enrich, and categorize it to a taxonomy that reflects the nuances of their business. The solution comes with 30 out-of-the-box savings analyses and is typically refreshed monthly or quarterly.
