Indirect Expenses

Can you quantify the opportunity that exists for your company by applying rigorous standards around procurement?

BottomLine Group helps its clients drive indirect expense savings through improvements to their strategic sourcing practices, and procurement processes.

Strategic Sourcing
BottomLine Group uncovers opportunities; whether this involves consolidating your supply base, creating cross-divisional commodity teams, putting preferred suppliers on global contracts, and/or instituting standard metrics to benchmark supplier performance. We deliver this through:

• Category Management – Recommending best practices to help clients optimize contracts, purchasing cycles, and costs by gaining a clear understanding of the services/ products purchased per spend category, as well as the unique dynamics of the markets.

• RFP – Providing the planning, specifications, evaluation criteria and tools to develop a well-architected RFP that describes your requirements and existing situation thoroughly, so that all proposals received are worthy of consideration.

• Supplier Negotiation – Conducting data analysis to define an effective negotiation strategy with all details for an execution that drives the results you set forth. We conduct the negotiations on your behalf, or support your negotiators.

• Project Management – Applying standards to planning and guiding each project from start to finish.

Case Study 3: “Expense Management – Insourcing, Large Pharmaceutical Company”

Process Improvement
BottomLine Group works with clients to assess their current procurement processes to identify opportunities to save money, reduce cycle times and increase employee satisfaction. This may be accomplished in a variety of ways:

• Demand Management – We help clients assess their current consumption of various products/services, and make recommendations on how they can streamline spending through behaviour change and/or procurement policy.

• E-Procurement Strategy – We design an effective e-procurement strategy with vendor selection, rollout and ongoing usage recommendations. Clients’ results can include: lower transaction costs, improved process efficiency, reduced “maverick buying”, increased contract compliance, improved cycle times, lower inventory costs, shifted transaction processing to the end users of the purchased goods/services, and freed-up supply management personnel for strategic value-creation work.

• Purchasing-Card Strategy – We share best-in-class strategies to assist clients in the successful rollout and ongoing usage of the Purchasing “P” card. P-cards serve as an effective payment method for key spending categories in reducing processing costs and streamlining administrative functions. Companies utilizing a P-card program have reduced costs by nearly $20 per transaction, however the challenge is to overcome the threshold of overall usage that has been tracked at 7%.

• Organizational Effectiveness – We make recommendations around realignment of roles and responsibilities to support your procurement policy, procedures and training to ultimately achieve the expense management goals set forth by your organization.

• Change Management – We apply best practices to develop a structured approach to help change the habits of your employees so that they are supporting your expense management efforts.

Case Study 4: “Expense Management – Process Improvement, A U.S. Publicly Traded Bank”