Using business process insights to boost vendor performance
Success Stories | Technology

Using business process insights to boost vendor performance

Business Issue

Procurement leaders across industries struggle with vendor metrics. How to get clear and actionable performance metrics and know what you are paying for? Our clients, the Supplier Performance and Governance team at a global tech company, had a real mess on their hands. They were spending annually in excess of $100 million on three major vendors. They lacked visibility into just how much support they were getting and how to optimize their partners’ contributions. They lacked a clear business process. Invoicing and contracting were inconsistent. Onboarding new workstreams was a cumbersome distraction. Evaluations were all over the place. In light of all the chaos, planning and forecasting were, of course, an afterthought.

What We Did

Escalent kicked things off by getting a grasp of the vendors’ invoicing. Were the invoices consistent with contracted terms? They were not – and within a month, the Escalent team was paying for itself simply by getting the vendors to bill accurately.

But establishing a clear and consistent business process for evaluation was the long-term goal. We created a standard schedule and consistent scorecarding. This helped us draw comparisons between vendors, which gave our client leverage in contract negotiations.

Our objective was not just to spot problems but to help our client’s vendors succeed. We helped them onboard new tasks and identify more accurate and efficient ways of managing their workstreams. We developed and managed a data warehousing system and scenario modeling. This drove an informed and disciplined planning process.

Result

A disciplined process transformation led to clear results. Simply getting accurate billing was a big win. But in addition, we helped them reduce supplier performance management effort by 50%, shorten supplier invoice processing time by 20%, and improve supplier performance by 10-20% across key metrics.

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