About this customer
This customer a leader among automotive trade groups in the UK and Ireland. Its Members – car and CV motor factor businesses – provide excellence in quality, availability and service in automotive parts for all makes of vehicles.
The Problem
The customer had a very manual process using excel that was hard to maintain with over 160 suppliers.
Over £150m of spend was not being analysed or utilised for better negotiations as the data capture took all of the time. Many of the suppliers were either late in submitting or had not submitted figures for up to a year leaving the customer only half a picture of their spend.
The spend had rebates attached to it, so it was extremely
The Solution
We went through the entire process, supplier-by-supplier until we had a full understanding of all of the potential process flows. We then looked to simplify the process to a point where we could digitise it.
We put all 160+ suppliers information through and reconciled it and then ran the new automated process where the customer did not have to get involved with any of the process of collecting. Once we were happy that all suppliers knew the new process and could complete it we then turned our attention to the reporting creating a supplier spend book of all relevant information and creating a natural language query so any member could query the data.
We then created several bespoke reports and refined the master data we had set up and identified millions of dollars of savings through missed rebates and targets for stretch rebates that were previously not reconciled. The customer also had a rebate where the figure was hard to calculate each year which now was being calculated monthly. Another benefit was that because the new process was very easy to follow all suppliers started supplying data again so we captured many missing supplier information and caught up the backlog of data reconciliation.
The Outcome
We went through the entire process, supplier-by-supplier until we had a full understanding of all of the potential process flows. We then looked to simplify the process to a point where we could digitise it.
We put all 160+ suppliers information through and reconciled it and then ran the new automated process where the customer did not have to get involved with any of the process of collecting. Once we were happy that all suppliers knew the new process and could complete it we then turned our attention to the reporting creating a supplier spend book of all relevant information and creating a natural language query so any member could query the data.
We then created several bespoke reports and refined the master data we had set up and identified millions of dollars of savings through missed rebates and targets for stretch rebates that were previously not reconciled. The customer also had a rebate where the figure was hard to calculate each year which now was being calculated monthly. Another benefit was that because the new process was very easy to follow all suppliers started supplying data again so we captured many missing supplier information and caught up the backlog of data reconciliation.