As the Head of our Customer Success team at Suplari, I have the privilege of speaking with many of our current clients each week, even in this crisis. In the past month or so we have all seen a sudden shift in business priorities. The normal flow of strategic sourcing, long term supplier negotiations, and compliance work has taken a back seat to cash flow management and supply continuity.
I’ve been making a point of asking our clients what they need right now to help promote their business success and survival amongst these trying times of crisis. In this article, I’ll outline a few short case studies that highlight their concerns and what we’ve done to help.
For the most part Suplari customers are taking steps to tighten non-essential spending and reduce expenses wherever possible. Broadly speaking, these actions can be classified as either “cost take out” or “cost avoidance” projects.
Helping Customers Avoid Costs & Improve Cash Flow
Case Study #1 – Delay a Big Supplier Payment
A large media company client asked us if we could help speed up some processes and focus their attention on a few key spend patterns. They wanted a weekly review of spend data to help locate any opportunities to delay large supplier payments coming up in the near future. A project like this typically takes a lot of time as the procurement team sifts through non-essential spend categories (travel, professional services, catering, events, construction, etc.) and tries to determine if any action can be taken to delay or cancel the future payment.
With Suplari’s insight generator, the team quickly built a custom insight to support this need. Using weekly data, the procurement team can now review any large forecasted spend items in non-essential categories predicted over the next 3 months in just minutes.
Case Study #2 – Catching Large New Supplier Spending
Another client, a large retail company, asked if we could help catch any large new spending across non-critical new suppliers. Due to the way regional buying decisions are made with this client, these non-critical spends could potentially slip past their central procurement team without much scrutiny.
Suplari was able to design a new insight that automatically tracks spending in specific subcategories and identifies and highlights new purchase orders made in the past 1-8 weeks. From this insight the procurement team can quickly drill down into the new purchase details to see the who, why and what of the purchase to determine if the payment can be mitigated.
Case Study #3 – Analyze Payment Terms to Generate Cash Flow
A large manufacturer client needed some help generating new cashflow. They wanted to find out if we could help them generate a report detailing the many varying supplier payment terms throughout the company (pay upon receipt, net 15, net 30, et.). The data was siloed in multiple spend systems — meaning it could take their team a week or more to generate the report manually.
Suplari was able to integrate a few insights for their team that allowed them to see any payment terms that didn’t align with their standards (and also to pinpoint where they had multiple payment terms with a single supplier). These insights allowed this business to quickly understand which agreements to focus on and which suppliers to reach out to so that they could maximize their cash flow and success in this difficult time of crisis.
Helping Clients with Cost Takeout Programs
Cost takeout has always been a primary goal for our procurement clients, but with the emergence of the COVID-19 epidemic, we’ve begun to see a few other actions take priority.
Case Study #4 – Remote Working Spend Analysis
One client – a large telecom provider – asked if we could help highlight and predict the growing spend they were seeing in p-card purchases and employee reimbursements as a significant number of employees began working from home (requiring computers, screens, peripherals, and subscriptions/software).
In less than 2 weeks Suplari was able to develop a new insight that gave their procurement team the leverage they needed to negotiate better rates. As an extra benefit, the insight also aided the compliance team as they worked to determine the appropriateness of all this additional spend.
Case Study #5 – Reviewing 2,000+ Contracts
In this final example, a real estate company client was having difficulty reviewing a large number of contracts across multiple systems. They needed to quickly make a plan to negotiate with suppliers near contract end dates to help take out any extra costs or discuss scope changes.
Suplari was able to ingest the metadata of over 2,000 contracts in a couple of days to support their request. This gave the client the ability to review their contracts by end dates, contract spend amount, and category – something that would have taken them such a long time in the past that they would have likely missed some big opportunities.
In all these examples, Suplari’s unique ability to quickly create custom insights to help support a wide range of procurement needs allowed our clients to speed up both the cash flow and cost takeout impact they could have in their organizations. The best part is that all of our clients can take advantage of these new cost take-out and cash flow improvement insights because of Suplari’s unified supplier data model.
We continue listening to our customers daily, and we’re working hard to develop new insights that help our clients solve their unique business problems and most difficult challenges, while promoting their success in crisis.
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Think your business could benefit from the success of Suplari’s advanced analytics and insights like the clients in these short case studies, especially now in COVID-19 crisis?
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