Insight Sourcing Group currently works with over 50 Private Equity firms and has performed hundreds of private equity procurement projects with portfolio companies. Insight Sourcing Group was an early pioneer in the application of Fortune 500 strategic sourcing best practices in a PE environment. We understand the complexities of Private Equity cross-portfolio spend management and bring a clear and proven approach to Private Equity cost optimization.

Should a PE firm pursue cross-portfolio spend aggregation or focus on cost optimization within individual portfolio companies? Or are there other strategies in between that might make sense? What’s worked at other firms and what has led to some of the more spectacular public failures?

Working with PE firms and portfolio companies, and particularly under a cross-portfolio model, has unique challenges and can be some of the most complex sourcing work any firm ever performs. Insight Sourcing Group is one of the most experienced firms in the space and can guide operating executives to the right strategy that fits your portfolio and your management model.

Few procurement consultants can match our ability to drive collaboration and support among portfolio executives. Our data driven approach and collegial style wins over reluctant portfolio stakeholders and consistently drives strong results. Above all, we understand the mid-market and how to work effectively with your often thinly stretched management teams.

Our Private Equity Procurement services include:

• Portfolio Spend Visibility
• Opportunity Assessment for a Portfolio Company
• Portfolio-level Strategic Sourcing
• Cross-portfolio Spend Consolidation & Strategic Sourcing
• "Co-Sourcing"
• Pre-Purchase Procurement Due Diligence
• Full PE Procurement Program Co-Management
• Standard and Private Group Purchasing (GPO) Programs
• M&A Integration & Carve Outs

Insight Sourcing Group works across all industries to provide targeted cost optimization and procurement-related services. Our end deliverables are measurable cost reduction and performance improvement. Our procurement analytics solution, SpendHQ, provides ongoing, crystal clear spend visibility.

Insight Sourcing Group blends the resumes and expertise of the larger firms with entrepreneurial flexibility and the power of focus. We engage with our clients in a way that works for them and we guarantee results.

The following services can be provided as individual offerings or combined as components of a total solution.

Procurement Transformation Services

For most companies, procurement is an area of significant underinvestment. So how do you convert your traditional “purchasing” department into a self-funding, ROI-generating strategic asset? The answer: Procurement Transformation.

Procurement Transformation Process & Methodology

We start with an assessment to benchmark your current state against over 750 proprietary procurement management best practices and compare with your current performance against both your objectives and against leading practices. Next we work closely with you to build a plan to close the gaps. And then we implement, getting into the trenches to make sure the new processes and procurement organization deliver.

Insight Sourcing Group’s methodology focuses on our proprietary 10-point Procurement Capability Model and includes all of the areas that are critical to procurement success. Each area includes two additional levels of depth with best practices mapped to each component, enabling us to readily identify gaps and determine the areas where you want to pursue best practice and where “good” is good enough.

Building Your Team for Long-Term Success

Our procurement transformation services focus on long-term sustainability, including: 

• Procurement Organization Design
• Capability Deployment
• Metrics and Policies
• Team Training
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Strategic Roadmap Building and CPO Planning

After sourcing, up to 30% of procurement savings evaporates for a myriad of reasons – whether due to pricing overcharges, “maverick spending”, supplier non-compliance, supplier gamesmanship, or limited savings tracking. Without a plan for savings tracking and sustainability, negotiated cost savings are at risk.

By mitigating savings leakage and uncovering incremental value in spend categories, Insight Analytics’ clients can ensure best-in-class savings outcomes are sustained over time. The process of analyzing procurement data, garnering insights, and executing action plans is highly complex, so we have developed a proven approach to driving bottom-line savings through data-driven category analytics.

Helping Procurement Find Value with Category Analytics

Insight Analytics partners with companies to drive savings to the bottom line by minimizing pricing errors, driving compliance, and capturing incremental savings on an ongoing basis. Tracking savings, preventing savings leakage, and driving incremental value are three ways Insight Analytics helps businesses and procurement organizations succeed.

Savings Challenges Solved by Insight Analytics

After you gain visibility into spend and set out a sourcing strategy, how are you proving that your savings are realized? Are you able to identify new savings opportunities after sourcing events? Learn more about how Insight Analytics addresses key issues via Procurement analytics:

• Our procurement data is extremely difficult to understand, analyze, or obtain
• We want to take a data-driven approach to managing our spend
• We don’t know how to effectively turn procurement data into actionable insights and value
• We need to get granular and understand spending across locations, divisions, and BU’s
• We need an operational way to ensure compliance with our preferred suppliers
• We need to prove that savings are hitting the P&L
• We need to find additional savings
• We don’t have clear visibility into the market

Insight Sourcing Group helps clients build and manage world-class Supplier Diversity programs. We partner with clients to develop an inclusive procurement strategy to widen the pool of potential suppliers and promote competition in the supply base, which can improve product quality, enable innovation, and drive down costs.

Insight Sourcing Group’s Supplier Diversity practice and Center of Excellence will help clients build best-in-class programs by focusing on four main pillars: Goals and Metrics, Sourcing Practices and Policies, Supplier Development, and Communications and Training. The foundation of any world class supplier diversity program is data clarity. Insight Sourcing Group is uniquely positioned among consulting firms to deliver clarity through its market-leading spend analytics platform, SpendHQ. By driving full visibility into current diversity spend and related areas for expansion, the firm is able to apply a powerful methodology for rapid impact and long-term sustainability.

Our Supplier Diversity Approach & Methodology

We offer four distinct services related to Supplier Diversity.

Current State Assessment

Conduct stakeholder interviews

Develop supplier analysis

Identify supplier diversity spend baseline

Conduct procurement assessment

Assess customer requirements

Assess regulatory factors

Perform best practice benchmarking

Future State: Strategy & Plan Rollout

Establish supplier diversity policies, goals & metrics

Develop category-specific diversity sourcing strategies

Identify future-state people, processes & technologies

Develop tracking requirements

Develop implementation approach

Establish communications plan

Plan Execution

Launch diversity sourcing pilots

Execute diversity sourcing process for “quick-hit” categories

Develop plan for subsequent waves

Explore creative diverse supplier strategies

Establish supplier diversity program infrastructure

Train stakeholders

Turn-key Managed Service

Ongoing program tracking & support

Annual spend analysis & baseline measurement

Annual facilitation of supplier diversity summit

SpendHQ-managed, client-branded supplier portal

Access to SpendHQ-powered diverse supplier database

Insight Sourcing Group helps clients capture procurement-related merger & acquisition synergies with speed and precision execution, from taking out costs to transforming the combined procurement organization.

We are an objective expert, often able to work during the “quiet period” before closing, to build a roadmap to rapid EBITDA improvement. We perform an analysis of each company’s spend and contracts, identifying quick hits and developing strategies for savings capture. Immediately after the transaction closes, we execute approved strategies with a seasoned, scalable team that works with your stakeholders to achieve integration targets.

For companies seeking a broad cost savings effort, Insight Sourcing Group conducts a procurement assessment that results in an EBITDA Improvement Roadmap. We can immediately launch strategic sourcing projects to capture savings identified by the Assessment.

The process begins by understanding your goals. We then collect data reflecting a full year’s worth of non-payroll expenditures by leveraging easy-to-get reports from your systems. Similarly, we use our spend analytics solution, SpendHQ to quickly organize the data to reflect the supply market.

We leverage our deep expertise in working with over 800 different companies to identify potential areas of opportunity. The next step is to perform brief, low impact interviews with key stakeholders at your company that understand the nuances of each target expenditure area. In some cases, we gather line item detail for a few categories in order to perform deep dive analytics and benchmarking in order to validate savings.

Once complete, we develop an opportunity assessment we call the “EBITDA Improvement Roadmap” that reflects validated opportunity areas plus spend and savings projections per category. We will then offer a proposal to deliver these savings to the bottom line, typically through strategic sourcing projects. After that, you decide whether to engage us and for which categories.

For approved categories, we immediately launch projects, leveraging the data we have already collected and the relationships we developed with your team through the interviews. Unlike some consulting firms, we perform every step of the process including deep analytics to create a baseline for savings measurement, direct negotiations with vendors, and support for contracting and supplier implementation as needed.

In the end we demonstrate the savings achieved through pre-approved methods. Insight Sourcing Group has a tremendous track record delivering savings within or above our initial savings estimates from the roadmap.

SpendHQ is a SaaS spend analytics solution that provides rapid, accurate, and detailed visibility into your spend data. It takes disparate data sources and transforms it into an enterprise-wide view of your total spend with suppliers.

Purpose-built for Procurement Leaders

SpendHQ is the market leader in spend visibility and category analytics. The Spend Visibility module provides a top-down, enterprise-wide view of spend across all categories for targeting sourcing and cost reduction opportunities. The Category Analytics module leverages granular, bottom-up data to manage and optimize critical spend categories.

New Functionality

SpendHQ 2.0 reflects a complete modernization of the software, built to be ‘future-proof’ so that as new technologies and capabilities become available, they can be quickly integrated. This entirely new platform includes all of the functionality of the legacy product but also several new features.

Advanced Embedded Analytics

With SpendHQ 2.0, procurement teams now have the ability to create their own custom dashboards with multiple data dimensions, creating impactful and actionable insights that can be shared with key stakeholders.

Sourcing Opportunity Identification

Insight Sourcing Group’s strategic sourcing heritage is embedded directly into 2.0, so that every user of SpendHQ has detailed insight into areas of opportunity for savings.

A Powerful Spend Analytics Platform.

SpendHQ 2.0 transforms your raw data into sourcing-caliber data, displays it on our enhanced visualization platform, and allows you to draw insights that can uncover tremendous savings opportunities.

TRANSFORM.

SpendHQ takes all of your messy, raw spend data through our market-leading spend data optimization process to ensure a minimum target of 97% spend categorization. Our innovative data approach incorporates advanced algorithm-based analytics built upon the $4 trillion in spend and 20 million unique vendor records we’ve categorized over the years to cleanse, normalize, and strategically categorize procurement data.

VISUALIZE.

Our intuitive user interface allows you to visualize your spend the way you need to see it. With best-in-class KPI and custom report capabilities, you are able to access the insights you need to make more meaningful decisions front-and-center, immediately upon login. Build unlimited custom reports with our fully integrated BI capability in our analytics module utilizing all data within SpendHQ or other data sets you might like to visualize.

ACT

SpendHQ goes beyond spend visibility. You are able to leverage the our sourcing heritage with detailed insight into areas of opportunity for savings based on our experience sourcing over 6,000 strategic sourcing projects. From uncovering maverick spend to identifying savings opportunities, SpendHQ puts you in control of your organizations spend.