Procurement spend analysis and supplier consolidation

Elmbridge Facilities Group provides cleaning, maintenance and security for offices, hospitals and airports. It has about 9,000 staff and spends about £180 million a year with 2,400 suppliers: £128 million in the UK, £34 million in Germany and £18 million in the UAE. Each country buys on its own. The UK alone uses 41 different suppliers for cleaning chemicals and 63 for workwear.

A new chief procurement officer has been asked by the board to save 5% of addressable spend within 18 months, without hurting service or creating supplier risk. She has no clean view of what is spent, with whom, on what.

You are the procurement analyst. In eight weeks you will: - build a spend cube from a payables extract, which you will create as a realistic synthetic set of about 60,000 invoice lines, with the mess real data has, and practise on the UK government's published spend over £25,000 on data.gov.uk; - classify spend into categories, normalise supplier names, and analyse it by category, country, supplier and business unit; - position categories on a Kraljic matrix and set a strategy for each; - build a consolidation business case for three categories, with savings, one-off costs and risks; - review supplier risk and compliance obligations, including UK modern slavery reporting, the German supply chain due diligence law and UAE in-country value programmes where they apply, described in general terms; - present a savings plan in waves to the CPO.

Done means a spend cube the CPO trusts, a savings pipeline that adds up to a defensible share of the 5% target, and a risk view showing that consolidation does not create a single point of failure.