Mission: to build a global category approach at the request of one of our members.

With our member's total spend in the US and Europe exceeding $3 million annually, they were seeking savings that expanded over the span of many borders. 

Collaborating with our member, we gathered the detail spend information at a country level. The category of focus was office supplies. The sub-categories involved were paper, toner and general office supplies. Of these three subcategories the percentage of spend divided up into  28% going towards paper, 24% to toner, with 48% spread among the other office supplies. Once this data was collected, we then priced those items relative to our leveraged agreements with Staples. 

By switching to our agreement, the company found savings that were immediate and sizable - over 25%. These savings came from taking a much broader "entire spend" approach with a wide focus on all items purchased rather than the narrow list of high volume items that had previously been in place. As part of the process, the member roped in the spend of 2 newly acquired businesses based on the saving potential demonstrated.

This case study was a "quick win" for all parties involved. The entire process moved along swiftly. From the beginning of CoVest's involvement it was approximately two and a half months to conduct the benchmarking analysis and the finalization of the category implementation. 

For a more visual analysis of the data click below,