Introduction:

This case study describes our role in helping a leading UK financial services company reduce the costs of third-party management actions as part of its planned divestment from its parent organisation.

While the work wasn’t a significant engagement, the case study gives an example of the additional value we can add when already ‘on the ground’, in this case combining our practical transformation, and commercial and strategic relationship expertise to quickly deliver an alternative view on the best use of internal and external resources for the client’s key activities.

The Client's Challenge:

Our client was progressing an ambitious agenda that included major restructuring and business transformation initiatives while seeking to accelerate preparations for divestment from its parent organisation.

The client’s challenges included a team that was inexperienced in the divestment process and therefore heavily reliant on external advisors, combined with a highly fragmented third-party landscape and budgetary constraints given the needs of the broader agenda.

Our Approach:

Already engaged in support of other transformation activities for the client, we were asked to quickly devise a pragmatic alternative approach to avoid the prospect of higher external consulting fees for the more labour-intensive aspects of the work.

Our key actions included:

• Validated stakeholder and cross-functional requirements across business units

• Conducted a thorough analysis of third-party volumes, contracts and spending

• Rapidly reviewing contract management capabilities, maturity and the leveragability of existing improvement actions

• Proposing a prioritisation of contracts given relevance, materiality and segmentation

• Outlining a roadmap for the necessary discovery work regarding the prioritized contracts

• Developing work breakdowns and resource forecasts to perform the work

• Presenting the plan and budget proposal to key stakeholders including the divestment programme team

• Supporting the client’s decision on how they wished to move forward

The Result:

The outcomes were:

• A fully costed roadmap, resource profile and budget proposal to allow the client to more fully consider their options to progress the work

• Highlighted opportunities to leverage synergies between that work and inflight actions within the team to improve third-party management capabilities within the team

Tags:

#FinancialServices, #Divestment, #SpendAnalysis, #Sourcing, #ThirdPartyManagement, #CostReduction