£30 million cut from procurement costs.
Forward visibility now spans two years.

Every negotiation pack started from a blank page.

Category procurement teams spent days building negotiation packs by hand for every commodity. Supplier, part and spend data sat scattered across ERP, sourcing tools, legacy systems and spreadsheets, each with its own IDs and naming conventions, so the packs that did get built were inconsistent from one category to the next.

Buyers also had almost no forward view of what they’d actually be buying. With limited visibility into expected purchases from each supplier over the next 3-24 months, procurement went into negotiations unable to quantify forward volume or spend exposure, weakening their hand at the table.

Three constraints were non-negotiable:

• Supplier and spend data fragmented across ERP, sourcing tools and spreadsheets
• Negotiation packs built manually, commodity by commodity
• No visibility into supplier spend or volume 3-24 months ahead

One mastered dataset, one dossier, every supplier.

The foundation was a supplier Master Data Management programme that built a governed spend cube: supplier names cleansed and standardised, taxonomy and classification applied consistently, FX handling normalised. An integration layer added canonical data models and cross-system mapping tables for supplier, plant, part and category, with lineage and audit trails so every insight could be traced back to source. Automated pipelines then pulled ERP, AP and other feeds into a single, mastered supplier view.

On top of that mastered data, dossier generation was automated end to end. A standard template produces supplier scorecards, cost-movement analysis, performance trends, risk flags and tailored negotiation levers — the same rigour applied to every commodity, every time, instead of whatever a category manager could assemble by hand.

A ‘future spend’ engine closes the forward-visibility gap. It links S&OP demand signals and BOM/take-rate plans to the mastered supplier-part hierarchy and historical spend, producing a rolling 3-24 month forecast of expected volumes and pound exposure per supplier. Those forecasts are embedded directly into the auto-generated dossiers, so buyers walk in able to quantify forward leverage, not just historical spend.

£30 million and a forecast buyers can actually use.

Consolidating spend, forecasts, performance, risk and contract intelligence into one auditable dossier let procurement identify leverage across suppliers and categories and negotiate from fact rather than guesswork. That work contributed over £30m in cost reduction, while the future-spend engine gave buyers a quantified 3-24 month view of volume and exposure. Automating data collation and pack creation freed category managers to focus on strategy, and better risk visibility meant mitigation could happen earlier — a repeatable, auditable source of negotiation intelligence built for sustained savings.