Category managers everywhere are being asked to do the work of three people. For most practitioners, their category-by-category engagement belies any definition of the word “manage”—because the bandwidth simply isn’t there to do much beyond getting contracts out the door and hoping for the best.

With indirect services, these resource limitations negatively impact the P&L. In these categories, continuous management is critical to defending the bottom line. An indirect service category without real category management is doomed to significant overspending and poor risk management.

At Fine Tune, our experts become an extension of your team, augmenting in-house resources with world-leading experts from the supplier side of the industries we manage.

Most indirect services entail multi-year supplier commitments. Unfortunately, what happens between those commitments is hugely variable and difficult to predict. Change is the only guarantee—but change also spells “margin grabbing” opportunities for your suppliers.

Sometimes the change comes from evolving service requirements. New processes, enhanced safety protocols, more exacting quality standards, or marketing and branding-related updates can all trigger unanticipated needs in the course of indirect service contracts. Other times the changes are even more sweeping, with mergers, acquisitions and divestitures triggering waves of new challenges. These changes rarely arrive at perfectly convenient times, and the buyer nearly always deals from a position of weakness in these moments.

With Fine Tune on their side, our clients have an on-call expert resource to help navigate even the thorniest pitfalls and most inconvenient changes within burdensome indirect service categories.