Category Archives: Cost Reduction

Legal Sourcing Requires A Legal Mind

Or at least an understanding of the legal mind! Sourcing Innovation occasionally covers Legal Sourcing, which is one of the sacred cows in many organizations. However, as the doctor has more expertise in Sourcing Technology than in Legal Sourcing, not very often. Thus, when the doctor sees a great article on Legal Sourcing, he points it out.

Last week, over on Spend Matters, he saw such a great article. Cyndi Joiner’s guest post on how you should “Be Smart When Sourcing Legal” is just such an article. You have to do your homework before approaching Legal, because they always do theirs, you have to understand the landscape, and you have to have a strategy. Cases are built on strategy, and firms that might need to argue those cases are selected on strategy, and if Supply Management does not have a strategy, Supply Management will be shown the front of the door before they even get into Legal’s office.

But if Supply Management has a strategy, they will not only be able to work their way into Legal’s offices, but earn their trust. And when they work with legal to execute strategic sourcing, they will not only get the sacred cow under control, but they will see spend leveraged across the enterprise, standardized rates, documented processes for engaging preferred firms for service, improved billing, and complete transparency and visibility into legal spend. And a sustainable savings average of 7-10%, or more, will be achieved.

To find out how your organization can achieve these savings, check out Cyndi Joiner’s guest post on “Be Smart When Sourcing Legal” over on Spend Matters.

Too Bad the US Post Office Did Not Follow Royal Mail’s Lead

The US Post Office is in dire straits. So dire that, as per the transcript of this PBS.org Newsmaker Interview from December 5, 2011, on how the “U.S. Postal Service Faces Big Changes Amid [its] Struggle to Deliver on Profitability”, the post office is planning to shutter almost half of the nation’s mail processing centres next spring. Given that it is currently 15 Billion in debt and owes about 5 Billion for retiree health benefits, it needs to save 20 Billion fast and it’s solution is a significant restructuring that it hopes will allow it to save 2 Billion next year and 20 Billion by 2015.

This is pretty drastic, and we’ll talk more about it in a bit, but it’s also surprising given that it’s counterpart across the pond, Royal Mail, at the same time, was discussing the results of its first major Procurement Transformation in “Special Delivery”, which ended in 2009 and saved 300 Million pounds. This was followed by a cost management program that doubled the savings number about a year later, which led into a second major transformation project, currently underway, where Royal Mail expects to save significant dollars yet again. 600 Million pounds, or roughly 1 Billion dollars, is very significant when you consider that the Procurement organization only influences about 1.7 Billion pounds of spend out of the 2.3 Billion pounds spend by Royal Mail. That means that, in roughly a 4 year period, as the transformation initiative was only announced in 2006, the organization averaged about a 9% savings a year in the public sector where it is under tight public procurement law, compliance, and regulatory demands. When you think about it, this is an absolutely amazing result.

In contrast, the U.S. Postal service is projecting a 14 Billion loss this year if it does not get legislative relief. 14 Billion! (Note that last year’s budget gave them 11 Billion legislative relief! Source: Red Dog Report (“obama budget includes 11 billion post office bailout”) And that this year’s budget is recommending another 11 Billion in relief. Source: Washington Post [postal service on tap for 11 billion bailout]) And this is the tip of the 238 Billion budget deficit it is predicting over the next decade if it doesn’t cut costs. (Source: United Liberty [united states postal service faces 238 billion budget deficit]) Given that it’s annual budget is about 68 Billion, based on expected Revenue for 2011, this represents a 20% loss! While Royal Mail was saving 9%, the US Post office was losing 16%, on track to lose 20% this year (and, based upon the projection of a 238 Billion deficit if nothing is done in 10 years, probably 30% plus in a few years).

Now, it’s tough when you have to deal with a drop in regular first class mail that amounts to 27% when compared with volume levels 10 years ago, especially when that is your primary source of revenue, but this drop was visible years ago, and efforts to reduce costs could have been underway years ago. The network should have been optimized 6 years ago, re-evaluated, and then optimized again last year. And, like Royal Mail, which was also dealing with increased competition and revenues declining at 5% a year for similar reasons, it should have focussed on vehicles and operations, business services, facilities management and property, IT and telecoms, and sourcing and demand management to do what it could to keep costs in line as much as possible year over year. Since network reorganizations of the type that the U.S. Post office has to undertake can take years, some losses were unavoidable, but this blogger finds it hard to believe that 14 Billion in losses were unavoidable. And, like Royal Mail, it should be making a hugh effort in Supplier Performance Management to help suppliers keep their costs down.

However, the most fascinating fact that is overlooked in all the news reports is the lack of focus on Supply Management. Back in 2007, the U.S. Postal Service licensed CombineNet’s advanced sourcing platform. While for years this platform, in the doctor‘s view, had usability issues in that self-service just wasn’t an option for most organizations, as per SI’s extensive coverage on CombineNet back in 2006/2007, when they were undergoing their first major transformation of the decade, this was one of the most powerful strategic sourcing decision optimization platforms on the planet. If the U.S. Post Office was properly applying this platform, the doctor believes they should have been saving money hand-over fist. After all, Royal Mail used Iasta, which only introduced its advanced sourcing platform in the 2007 timeframe, about 7 years after CombineNet, and saved big-time. (Note that this is not a knock against Iasta, as the platform they introduced was rock solid, but an attempt to make a point that the platform CombineNet had was seasoned and powerful enough to do what the U.S. Post Office needed it to do, including re-optimizing the entire U.S. Post Office service network.)

Supply Management can save just about any organization, but the organization has to be willing to use Supply Management, and the tools and techniques Supply Management brings to the table, and used Supply Management aggressively if the organization is serious about staying above water.

Can Cost Management On Its Own Be Strategic?

A recent issue of eSide Supply Management published a piece on “Strategic Cost Management and the Supply Base” that, while full of good advice, might be misleading to an up-and-coming Supply Management practitioner who needs to be set on the right road early on. However, before I can explain, let’s review the key points from the article.

The article started off great when the author noted that:

It might sound obvious, but when faced with a cost improvement challenge from your business, a good place to start is to think about what you’re practically being asked to do. Does the scope of the request apply to an innovative product or service whereby you more likely need to achieve an optimized cost, while simultaneously trading off against other attributes such as performance, delivery channel or customer appeal? Or, is the focus on a current product or service which is no longer deemed competitive or requires maintenance of a current selling price via cost reduction efforts.

The reality is that cost management is not simply keeping prices down. It’s keeping total cost down — where total cost is the total lifecycle cost of the product, which includes acquisition, manufacturing, distribution, sale, warranty, return, and disposal — while keeping total value up — which includes quantitative factors such as low defect rates and high reliability and qualitative factors such as market appeal and differentiation. And the best way to achieve this goal will be different for every product.

And the goal will always be cost, and not price, reduction, because cost reduction is typically sustainable over the long term, while price reduction is often a short-term commercial concession, which is then typically reversed later when the power balance in the buyer/supplier dynamic changes.

However, cost reduction is a more difficult task, especially when the suppliers have power, but there are tools available to help the buyer. The author does a good job of pointing out some of them, including:

  • analytics and benchmarking
    which can provide a buyer with a detailed cost breakdown and a foundation for an accurate cost (of production and distribution) model — which helps the buyer understand how much it should be costing the supplier and what level of profit margin the supplier is trying to get
  • integrated product teams
    whose collective understanding of the product or service from a production, distribution, use, and repair and recovery perspective can shed insight on potential opportunities for cost reduction that a supply manager may not see on his own
  • supplier involvement (from a technical perspective)
    a good supplier is full of innovative ideas to provide your organization with more value (and keep you as a customer) — especially if you bypass sales and go straight to the product engineers or service professionals (as they know where the cost is)

But even though this will help with the multifaceted, complex and often perplexing arena of supplier cost management that supply management professionals have to deal with on a daily basis, it kind of misses the full picture — that cost is only one component of strategic supply management and if supply is strategically managed, cost will fall in line as the buyer will know what costs need to be managed and what costs (of little consequence) can, more-or-less, be ignored.

After all, it’s usually not the initial price that constitutes most of the cost, but the unexpected expedited deliveries, the unexpected high rate of failure and warranty returns, the cost of unhappy customer retention, the losses associated with inventory stock-outs because the supplier couldn’t deliver on time at all (even with expedited deliveries) that constitute most of the unnecessary cost in a category. Control the supply, control the cost.

Thoughts?

Managing Indirect Spend: An In-Depth Review, Part III

In our last post, which ended the review of Part II of Managing Indirect Spend, a new book by William (Bill) Dorn and Joe Payne of Source One that takes you on an excellent adventure through the world of indirect sourcing (that they have been living in for the past two decades, well before Strategic Sourcing and Supply Management became cool), we discussed the non-software tools at a sourcing professional’s disposal, Procurement Services Providers (PSPs), and the (common) mistakes that can kill a sourcing project. This wrapped up our discussion of the capabilities at a sourcing professional’s disposal. Today, we’re going to discuss Part III, Examples from the Field, and focus on some of the results that can be obtained when applying the best practices discussed in the section.

The examples focussed around the gains that can be achieved by collaborating with suppliers, leveraging supplier feedback, and analyzing data — which, as SI outlined in Spend Visibility: An Implementation Guide, we know to be significant even before the application of additional tools and techniques. We’ll start with supplier collaboration.

As Bill and Joe point out, collaborating with your suppliers can produce surprising and profitable results. In fact, collaborating with your entire supply chain (including your suppliers’ suppliers) can often produce sustainable results that equate to large cost savings opportunities. Plus, it encourages partnerships with your suppliers, which may lead to your company being the first in line for new product developments or other supplier benefits.

Consider these examples from the text:

  • specifying printer models and toner requirements, instead of brand name toner cartridges, generally leads to savings north of 50% when suppliers are asked to propose low-cost (non-OEM) solutions
  • the cost of a simple chemical compound was reduced 39% when the buyer worked with the supplier to jointly source expensive regulatory valves at a higher volume
  • the willingness to work with a new supplier that produced a required solvent at an insufficient level of purity (and guarantee them a reasonable amount of business under the right circumstances) if the supplier was willing to refine their manufacturing process to get to the required level of purity convinced the supplier to make the infrastructure investment and saved the customer a considerable amount of money now that a third, lower-cost supplier, had entered the market

In addition to collaborating with suppliers, you can use the information they provide to your advantage. By leveraging the information that your supply chain provides, you can actually achieve deeper discounts in the products or services you are buying, and improve the overall relationship and integration with each of your suppliers. This can lead to results like the following:

  • by working with suppliers to find out what was possible, the buyer was able to approach the incumbent and ask for a new type of telecommunications infrastructure that reduced organizational cost by 35%
  • by working with the supplier to find out when the supplier wanted to make a sale, and the supplier representative, who was quite eager to make a bonus target, the customer was able to get a software product (only available through resellers) at cost with terms of net 30 days, allowing it to delay the purchase to the following quarter (while still allowing the supplier, and the representative, to recognize the sale this quarter)
  • a buyer which needed specialized multi-million dollar computer equipment that could only be supplied by one supplier was able to reduce its costs and get millions of free marketing by allowing the supplier to use its logo in its advertisements (which the supplier promised to spend millions on if the buyer allowed the use of its logo)

Lastly, there are great opportunities to be had through data analysis, including:

  • a detailed line analysis that will often identify a significant number of (secondary) phone lines that are not required that are costing the organization hundreds (or thousands) each
  • the appropriate segregation of MRO spend into the right buckets that will allow suppliers to be more competitive on the categories they are strong in, as this will decrease overall cost significantly
  • the identification of non-compliant spend and the top offenders as a few choice words from the CFO to these individuals (or their superiors) will considerably decrease maverick spend quickly increase realized savings 20% to 30%

There are plenty more examples, but considering that SI essentially co-wrote a book detailing what they are and how to find them in Spend Visibility: An Implementation Guide (free download, no registration required), we’re not going to go into them any further in this post, especially since the important lesson is that you should be leveraging the information provided by the supply chain (for analysis) and then working with your suppliers to implement the best solution(s) you identify.

Stay tuned. After another break, SI will conclude it’s review of Managing Indirect Spend later this month with Part IV: How to Do It.

Series to date:

A Primer on Private Equity for CPOs

Private Equity (PE) investment is on the rise in the EU and the US. However, most of us still don’t know very much about what PE is, how it works, or what Procurement’s role is when dealing with a PE firm. That’s why it was great to see this recent article over on CPO Agenda on “The Final Frontier for CPOs” that tried to create more transparency around the practices and importance of Procurement and Supply Chain in this field.

The first thing to note is that PE groups generally make their money by increasing the value of their portfolio companies while retaining part of the generated value by the time they exit the investment in the company at a higher financial valuation. The acquisition of a portfolio company is financed from funds that are raised from private and institutional investors that give the PE group the task of investing the money, managing the portfolio companies and returning an appropriate profit on the investments.

Given the pivotal role that Procurement and Supply Management have in a company’s competitiveness, product innovation and environmental and social footprint, Procurement and Supply Management serve two important tasks in a corporate context from a PE viewpoint:

  • a strong cash flow contribution to meeting debt obligations under the financing terms in the short term
  • a dedicated and measurable effort to swiftly and sustainably improve EBIT and company valuation in the medium term

Remembering that cash is king in a PE buy-out, cash-flow is crucial. Giving Supply Management’s razor-sharp focus on cost reduction and cost control, Supply Management improves cash-flow that is the vital blood of a PE turn-around. It does this by

  • releasing supply-chain related working capital tied up in unnecessary inventories or unfavourable payment terms
  • achieving like-for-like annual company spend reductions of 3% to 6% though the establishment of price competitive with the most suitable suppliers

Plus, Supply Management’s focus on sustainability helps PE since

  • a lasting and recognizable improvement of the procurement and supply chain capabilities can have a considerable positiveeffect on the sale price of the company
  • the benefits of cost engineering, supplier development and supply chain relocation can be harnessed within the typical investment period of four to five years

And Supply Management can benefit from PE and their support for the establishment of procurement platforms they strive to harness spend synergies (mostly in indirect materials) and best practice across the portfolio companies. In other words, done right, PE and Supply Management can be a win-win relationship.