Automotive Procurement Cuts £30M+ Using Supplier Insights & Forecasts

Context

A global automotive manufacturer operating complex, multi-plant supply chains sought to equip procurement teams with standardized Supplier Insights Dossiers that consolidate spend, forecasted spend, performance, risk, and contract intelligence per supplier. The objective was to improve negotiation leverage, speed, and outcomes across global sourcing categories by giving category managers a single, auditable view of supplier economics and exposure. The program targeted indirect and direct commodities across manufacturing and assembly operations, with an emphasis on traceable insights that could be relied upon during high-stakes supplier negotiations and strategic sourcing events.

Challenges

Supplier, part, and spend data resided across ERP, sourcing tools, disparate legacy systems and spreadsheets with inconsistent IDs and naming conventions, creating major data quality and harmonisation issues. Category procurement teams spent days assembling negotiation packs manually, which limited coverage and produced inconsistent dossiers across commodities and regions. Compounding this was a limited forward view of expected business demand from each supplier over the next 3–24 months, weakening negotiation leverage because buyers could not quantify forward volume or exposure. These problems also reduced confidence in supplier performance and contract intelligence, slowed negotiation cycles, and made risk identification and mitigation reactive rather than proactive.

Implementation

The implementation began with a supplier Master Data Management program to create a governed spend cube: supplier names were cleansed and standardised, taxonomy and classification schemes were applied consistently, and FX/currency handling was normalised to remove reconciliation friction. An integration layer with canonical data models and cross-system mapping tables for supplier, plant, part and category was established, together with lineage and audit trails so every negotiation insight could be traced back to source systems. Automated pipelines ingested feeds from ERP, AP and other data sources into a single, mastered supplier view. A “future spend” engine was built to link 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. Forecasted figures were embedded into auto-generated Supplier Insights Dossiers using a standard template that produced supplier scorecards, cost movement analyses, performance trends, risk flags and tailored negotiation levers. The solution also automated data collation, reconciliation and standard pack creation so dossiers were consistent, auditable and reproducible at scale. The project team ensured traceability by retaining lineage and audit logs for each data element and insight, enabling category managers to present fact-based narratives that directly referenced source transactions and forecasts.

Results

By consolidating spend, forecasted spend, performance, risk and contract intelligence into auditable Supplier Insights Dossiers, procurement was able to identify leverage across suppliers and categories more effectively, enabling more assertive, fact-based negotiation narratives. The initiative contributed to over £30m in cost reductions through improved leverage identification and negotiation outcomes. Negotiation dossier preparation time was dramatically reduced by automating data collation and reconciliation and by deploying the standard dossier template, freeing procurement teams to focus on strategy rather than manual assembly. The future-spend capability gave buyers a quantified forward view of expected volume and spend exposure for the next 3–24 months, materially strengthening negotiation positions and category planning. Improved supplier risk visibility from consolidated performance trends and risk flags led to earlier mitigation actions and reduced supply disruption exposure. Overall, the programme delivered faster, more consistent negotiation preparation, broader coverage across global sourcing categories, and a repeatable, auditable source of negotiation intelligence that supported sustained savings and risk management.