A “Three-Legged Stool” Approach to Optimizing Indirect Spend
As any procurement professional who’s managed indirect categories will tell you, the relative spend is not equal to the relative headaches. To optimally manage the most burdensome indirect categories—e.g., uniform rental, waste & recycling, pest control, security & guard services, and energy & utilities—an equally complex approach is required. [...]
Who’s Managing These Tail Spend Expenses, Anyway?
We’ve frequently discussed in recent years how leaned out procurement departments are increasingly vulnerable to attack by their indirect suppliers, on a range of fronts. Perhaps the most acute vulnerability facing these departments in 2023 is the inability to engage in any sort of actual expense management whatsoever, especially [...]
Price = Checkers; Cost = Chess
With highly complex indirect services like uniform rental, focusing on unit rates is playing checkers. To play three-dimensional chess, you need to elevate your focus from rates/prices to all of the factors that ultimately drive your true costs. [...]
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Inflation or padded profits? As suppliers levy excessive price increases, defend your bottom line
It is unmistakably correct that indirect suppliers are viewing real inflation as a margin-grabbing opportunity. What, then, can vulnerable buyers do to defend their bottom lines in these times? [...]
The Emergence of Hostile Supplier Behaviors & What to Do About It
Growing imbalance in the supplier / customer relationship is creating critical vulnerabilities for procurement organizations [...]
IPCC’s Latest Warning Drives an Urgent Climate Call-to-Action—Join Us in Answering the Call
On August 5, 2021, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its 6th Assessment Report on Climate Change. There’s a good chance the report crossed your radar like […]
Scary Supplier Practices
Supplier-driven events that negatively impact your cost-savings efforts in indirect categories—with a spooky twist. [...]
Uniform Rental Industry Alert: How a Uniform Rental Route Person Can Impact Your P&L
It’s 8am on Tuesday: time for the weekly uniform rental delivery at your Omaha facility. The cheery and personable uniform route representative, Rory, enters the plant clutching the newest copy […]
Technology Innovation and Investment: Requirements for Effective Expense Management
What differentiates you as an expense management consultancy? We hear this question often. Of course, we have industry experts with over one hundred years’ combined subject-matter experience and expertise in […]
Private Equity Alert: Time to Take Action on “Under the Radar” Expenses
As we discussed in “Do Traditional Portfolio Management ‘Tools’ Provide Real P&L Relief?,” many private equity enterprises deploy a “toolbox” of strategies designed to drive cost reduction and efficiencies for […]