SITUATION

Our client, a $20 billion U.S. based bank holding company, had experienced a great deal of success over the last ten years. The businesses focus during this time has been to capitalize on this success and work diligently to continue to grow its operations. However, during this period of rapid growth, the organization’s grasp on cost management had begun to slip. The organization had recently hired a new CPO to carry out a project to improve procurement processes and reduce spend across the organization.

One particular area of concern was the amount the organization was spending on external labor. In order to meet the resource needs of its ever-expanding operations the organization had relied heavily on external consultants and contractors. Obviously, these external resources come with a premium price tag and the organization’s CPO and Vice President of Supplier Management were keen to get a better understanding of these costs.

SOLUTION

In order to ensure project success, the client sought the experience and expertise of an OnDemand consulting team.  The first task of this team was to conduct a thorough review of the organization’s global external labor spend (a category that was currently costing more than $500 million a year and growing at 10% per year).

In order to carry out this review the team methodically analyzed spend, contracts, invoicing and the organizations general ledger to develop a ‘spend cube’ that provided a clear insight into what the organization was spending and with whom. The analysis also provided transparency into the benefits the organization was receiving from these third party providers.

Once the analytical phase was complete, the team conducted a series of interviews with customers, suppliers and key stakeholders in order better understand the current operating model and to determine where cost saving opportunities may lie.

The team also conducted an in-depth review and analysis of the current supplier market for external labor in order to determine exactly where the cost saving opportunities lay for the client.

RESULTS

The Ondemand team worked diligently on this project and was able to develop ten key cost savings initiatives for our client. Our detailed spend analysis provided the client with clear, concise business information that enabled $30-60 million in cost savings to be realized across the consulting, contracting and temporary labor sector. These figures have now been written into the client’s budget for 2015.

The supply market analysis conduced by our team gave our client a detailed understanding of the market in which they are operating and identified opportunities for further cost savings through supplier rationalization, rate negotiation, demand management and channel optimization.

The results and recommendation our team generated were done so through direct collaboration with the clients key stakeholders. This meant that the impact on the entire business was taken into account before the findings were delivered.