Outsourcing Advisory

This is where West Monroe comes in. Our award-winning outsourcing advisory services offer an undeniably different approach to the standard digital procurement strategy—one built on the experience of- facilitating hundreds of successful vendor partnerships. We don’t just reduce cost, improve quality, and accelerate results. We focus on the contractual terms to reduce risk and increase contractual flexibility.

Through our digital procurement services and solutions, we combine best-in-class sourcing processes and practices with contractual negotiations experience across a broad range of products and services: enterprise applications, IT hardware, enterprise telecommunications and wireless, application development and maintenance services, and many other categories.

Time and time again, the benefits of a robust digital procurement strategy speak for themselves:

• Increased buying power
• Enhanced visibility into enterprise-wide spend patterns
• Reduced risk associated with suboptimal or misaligned vendor agreements
• Greater contractual flexibility
• Greater ability to meet internal and external demands
• Lower costs

What We Do in Digital Procurement Consulting

When you work with West Monroe and our digital procurement services, you work with teams that bring the technical requirements, pricing benchmarks, leading service levels, and a deep understanding of what can be achieved in contractual negotiations to achieve the best deal in the shortest time possible. You’ll have a partner that can describe the art of the possible to your stakeholders—and that can lead negotiations with your teams to achieve it. Our procurement consulting team drives the benefits of strategic sourcing across spend categories through category analysis, RFx development and management, supplier evaluation, and contract negotiation support. This includes engaging multidisciplinary teams to consolidate purchasing power, improve total cost of ownership, and build effective strategic supplier relationships for clients.

Improve your strategic sourcing and digital procurement capabilities  

How can you boost your buying power, reduce risk, improve quality, and increase contractual flexibility? Whether you are addressing overall strategic sourcing performance or a specific problem area, we ground our work in your business. That means:

• Examining current contracts, quality, productivity, policies, and processes
• Interviewing business leaders to understand their needs and concerns
• Benchmarking contract terms, service levels, and pricing for key categories
• Analyzing vendor and category spend to identify consolidation and strategic sourcing opportunities.

We combine that insight with the art of the possible in the market to achieve what your organization requires.

Source, select, and negotiate productive vendor relationships

How can you be sure you’re making the right deals? Drawing on extensive experience negotiating third party relationships, and industry trends, we help you take the right steps at every stage – including bidding, analyzing, negotiating, contracting, and transitioning to the new provider.

We’ve been there many times and understand how to tackle complexity in digital procurement consulting – for example:

• Developing strategies to determine what to buy and how to buy it
• Gathering requirements from diverse stakeholders and synthesizing them into clear RFIs, RFPs, and RFQs
• Evaluating alternatives thoroughly, even when it is difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons
• Developing comprehensive financial analyses to support recommendations and understand long-term impact
• Building the right terms and performance incentives into contracts
• Making sure steps are in place for getting a new relationship off to a productive start

Realize greater value from existing vendor relationships

Can you keep the momentum going? Loss of value frequently happens as contracts progress. Strong vendor management and governance capabilities can prevent this loss. Our procurement operations team will make sure you are prepared to achieve what an agreement promises, maintain appropriate leverage, and identify new opportunities that benefit both sides of the relationship. Here are some other ways we support sound vendor management and governance:

• Establishing vendor performance metrics and tracking capabilities
• Creating incentives for continuous improvement
• Establishing and facilitating business and commercial review processes
• Establishing a vendor management office
• Evolving agreements to remain current with business needs
• Remediating deficiencies in vendor agreements

Establish value-oriented IT and business process outsourcing arrangements

How could you increase shareholder value, achieve financial goals, or improve operational performance by outsourcing certain IT or business processes? We’ve worked with many clients to outsource key business and IT functions, with deal values ranging from $10 million to several billion dollars. We understand where to look for the right opportunities – and then how to develop them into significant savings and better process performance.

Our outsourcing advisory experience spans virtually all IT and business functions. We provide a full life cycle approach: Assess, Source, and Transition

Assess: an objective, data-driven approach to develop the right service delivery model) for each IT tower, leveraging our proprietary benchmarking data

Source: developing the sourcing strategy, bidder list development, requirements gathering / RFx development, bidder process management, proposal evaluation, and contract negotiations through execution

Transition: running the Transition Management Office (TMO) responsible for developing detailed transition plans, managing risk registers, and ensuring that all stakeholders execute on the transition plan to deliver an on-time, on-budget, non-disruptive transition.

Establishing leading vendor management

How can you improve the performance of your partnerships? We ensure you have the people, processes, and tools to effectively manage mission-critical IT service and product contracts and supplier relationships. This includes detailed playbooks to successfully deliver contract management, financial management, performance management, and relationship management. Our outsourcing advisory services understand where to look for the right opportunities to improve partnership—and then develop them into significant savings and better process performance.

Distressed Deal Remediation

How could you improve a third-party relationship that has turned sour? We apply out-of-the box solutioning to finding ways to remediate distressed deals without an over-reliance on arbitration or other legal proceedings that can turn into a lose-lose situation. We identify, assess, and execute on all possible levers including contract renegotiations, re-competing and sourcing, process and technology changes, and rebuilding relationships with proper governance structures.