Opportunity assessment

Our procurement opportunity assessment (OA) is the ideal introduction and launch pad to make a step-change in your procurement performance.

It involves an in-depth analysis of your external spend, spanning all regions and categories, to rapidly identify high-potential improvements within your organisation.

Our expert consultants work with our advanced digital spend analytics application to deliver each opportunity assessment at pace and with minimal disruption to existing operations.  

The process is conducted within four to six weeks and requires comparably little senior management time. Not only are cost savings and working capital improvements identified, but also vital opportunities for addressing ESG in your supply chain. Likewise, an OA can highlight capability and capacity shortages or any gaps you have against leading practices to address when designing a procurement target operating model state. 

By undertaking an Opportunity Assessment with us, we help you answer these fundamental questions: 

• What do we spend our money on, and where do we spend it? 
• How sophisticated are we in each spending category? 
• What is the potential for further cost reduction, ESG improvements or total value creation? 
• How do we realise this potential? 
• Is my procurement team equipped with the tools and systems  to deliver this potential? 

What we give you

At the end of the procurement assessment, you will gain:

• Spend insights: An in-depth analysis of who buys what from whom, segmented into market-facing spend categories in an accurate, granular ‘spend cube’ you can access via our digital platform, eFlow 
• Category Approaches: Identification of your supply and demand-driven opportunities in each category.  
• Initiative Phasing: An assessment of the size and complexity of your improvement opportunities and the recommendations for phasing them. 
• Organisational Assessment: An assessment of your current procurement activities and proposals for improving procurement's impact within your organisation. 
• Savings case: An indication of savings targets with a clear savings ramp. 
• Implementation plan: A comprehensive but pragmatic roadmap to achieve the savings and value targets.

How the process works

Typically, we deploy a team of opportunity assessment specialist consultants to run the process, calling on other experts as required. They collect, clean, and classify spend data while conducting brief interviews with procurement staff and other stakeholders to understand each category’s current practices and requirements. Once completed, the assessment provides a clear set of deliverables that define the scope of the possible procurement project, identify the optimum sourcing levers to employ, and leave you with a clear, realistic and actionable path forward. 

During the process, we create a "spend cube" using our advanced spend analytics digital tool which makes it easy to interrogate your spend data by category, business unit and supplier. The platform is available as a one-off exercise, or you can retain access, and continue refreshing your spend cube periodically.

Our expertise

We have been conducting opportunity assessments for over 20 years across industrial, commercial and retail sectors and private equity (PE) investment portfolios. For many of our PE clients, a procurement audit is included in the 100-day plan, often as a "front runner" that delivers tangible EBIT uplift before other value-creation initiatives bear fruit.

This service can be a real eye-opener: for clients with complex multi-tiered supply chains, such as in construction or infrastructure, this can be the first time they gain transparency across a supply chain dominated by a small number of strategic partners who sub-contract significant amounts of work.

We generally expect our opportunity assessment to address 80% of external spend. In little time, an audit of your procurement function can provide deep insights, highlight procurement risks, inform future developments, and introduce the potential for further opportunities to enhance your procurement and supply chain.