Supplier leverage, built and used.
Procurement underperforms in growth companies for a consistent reason: it was set up to buy things, not to manage the cost and risk of the supply base. Categories are bought reactively. Supplier relationships are managed at the transactional level. The total cost of ownership — price, terms, quality, logistics, inventory, and risk — is never calculated. The spend is too fragmented to leverage. The contracts are evergreen because nobody reviewed them at renewal. The Atelier engagement builds the category strategy and the supplier leverage that should have existed three years ago — and captures the savings in the current financial year.
What the engagement covers
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- 01
Spend analysis: total addressable spend by category, supplier concentration, contract status.
- 02
Category strategy: for each material category — strategic, leverage, bottleneck, routine — the right sourcing approach.
- 03
Supplier rationalisation: which suppliers to consolidate, which to develop, which to exit.
- 04
RFP and negotiation: competitive events run with commercial rigour, not just price comparison.
- 05
Contract management: standard terms, payment terms leverage, performance obligations.
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Supplier relationship management: tiering, review cadence, development of strategic partners.
- 07
Working capital: payment terms as a working capital lever — days payable outstanding managed as a metric.
Who engages a Procurement & Strategic Sourcing
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- 01
Manufacturers with high direct spend and a procurement function that has plateaued.
- 02
PE-backed platforms where supplier consolidation and payment-terms discipline are unfunded value in the model.
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Retailers and healthcare operators whose indirect spend has grown faster than revenue for three years running.
Engagement structure
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Category-by-category, typically three to six categories in a six-to-nine-month engagement, with executive leadership over the procurement function throughout.
Where the boundary sits
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Not a savings-report factory disconnected from the P&L.
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Not a reverse-auction service — the work is category strategy and supplier leadership, not tactical bidding.
Where this discipline compounds.
If procurement is reporting savings the P&L cannot see, a scoped conversation is the right first step.
Engage
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