Procurement outsourcing for manufacturers

No. Direct materials sit next to engineering, drive your unit cost and depend on relationships built over years. We support that work with market research, RFx preparation and bid analysis when asked. We do not run it and we do not award it.

Everything bought that does not go into the product: maintenance parts and spares, consumables, tooling, safety equipment, lubricants, facilities and cleaning, contract labour, freight, IT and telecoms, professional services. It is bought by more people, from more suppliers, in smaller amounts than direct materials — which is why it absorbs procurement time out of all proportion to its value per line.

It is the normal starting condition, usually after an acquisition. We work inside each system rather than asking you to consolidate first, and the spend analysis maps both to one classification so group reporting works before any ERP migration does.

Emergency buying stays with the people who can act fastest, which is your plant. What we change is what happens afterwards: the part gets sourced properly, added to the catalogue and put under an agreed price, so the next time it is a catalogue order rather than a phone call at list price.

Most of them, because most are not matching failures at all — they are missing goods receipts, tolerance breaches nobody owns, or invoices arriving with no purchase order. We chase the receipt, chase the requester, apply your tolerances consistently, and report the root causes monthly so the volume falls rather than just gets cleared.

It is what we recommend. One plant or one category gives a real measurement against a real baseline, and gives your team a working example to judge before anything wider is agreed.

Either a price per transaction — per invoice, purchase order or requisition — or a monthly fee for a dedicated analyst. Both models are on the table from the first call. We quote after the free audit, because the honest number depends on your volumes, your systems and how many transactions need exception work. Anyone quoting before seeing that is guessing.

Compare your fully loaded cost per invoice, purchase order or requisition against the quote. Fully loaded means salaries, benefits, overhead, software and the hours your buyers and approvers spend chasing. The free audit measures your current figure, so the comparison is your number against ours rather than a benchmark against a brochure.

We say up front rather than at renewal. Setup and process documentation sit inside the fixed-fee pilot. Ongoing fees cover the agreed scope and volume band. Anything outside it — a new entity, a new system, a large one-off backlog — is quoted separately before work starts.

Four to six weeks from first conversation to a team running live work. Roughly two weeks for the audit, then a fixed-fee pilot, then steady state. Your side of the work is a data extract, one named contact, scoped system access and your approval rules.

SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Infor, Epicor, Sage and QuickBooks, plus the MRP and maintenance systems around them. We work inside your system rather than asking your team to learn ours, so there is no migration and no new licence. Where you run more than one — usually after an acquisition — we work in each and map both to one classification for group reporting.

Access is scoped by you, granted to named individuals and revoked through your own leaver process. We contract on standard clauses, name every sub-processor, and work to GDPR, UK GDPR, PIPEDA, the Australian Privacy Principles and Saudi PDPL. ISO 27001 alignment is in progress and SOC 2 Type II is on the roadmap. We state certification status as it is rather than showing badges we do not hold.

Delivery is from India and the Middle East, and we say so plainly rather than burying it. Your data stays in your systems — we work inside them rather than copying data out. Where a copy is unavoidable, the storage region is written into the DPA, and we support UK IDTA and EU standard contractual clauses for transfers to India.

ISO 27001 or SOC 2 Type II, then two follow-up questions most providers dodge: which legal entity is certified, and what the audit scope actually covers. A badge on a website tells you nothing without those two answers. Ask us the same questions.

Duplicate detection runs before approval routing. Any change to a supplier's bank details is treated as an exception, never actioned by us, and escalated to your nominated contact for out-of-band verification. The analyst who maintains supplier master data is never the analyst who processes that supplier's invoices.

No. We prepare and route; you approve and release. Nobody on our side can move money or authorise a payment, and your delegation of authority stays exactly as it is.

Named analysts assigned to your account, with named backup cover for leave and absence. You know who does the work and who to call. Cover is a contractual term, not something you find out about when someone is on holiday.

Turnaround time, accuracy and exception-closure rates are agreed during the pilot against your measured baseline, then reported monthly. Remedies for a sustained miss are written into the contract rather than left to goodwill, and either side can exit on notice if the numbers do not hold.

Most clients redeploy them onto direct materials, supplier development and the cost-down work that never got attention rather than cutting headcount. We will tell you honestly what your volume supports instead of promising a headcount number to win the work.

You keep the SOPs and process documentation, because they are yours throughout, and your data never leaves your systems. Transition-out support is written into the contract from day one rather than negotiated at the point you want to leave.

When your volumes are low enough that one competent buyer covers them, when your spend is so technical that judgement cannot be separated from the transaction, or when no one internally has time to own the relationship. We will say so on the first call. A pilot that fails costs us more than a deal we decline.

Indirect and MRO spend cut by plant, category and supplier; requisition, purchase order and invoice volumes; cycle times; exception rates; and how many suppliers you are actually paying. You get a written baseline you keep whether or not you go further, and it is the number every later comparison is made against — including ours.