A private equity level procurement marketplace such as Premikati’s PE Marketplace allows firms to maximize on savings utilizing group purchasing power and then enforce those negotiated rates to ensure savings are captured. Opportunities for purchasing autonomy remain at the portco level while spend analysis and sourcing events can be managed centrally at the PE level. PE firms are also able to add or remove portcos at will as they are being sold and acquired—removal occurs within minutes when needed. PE-level purchasing also assists in reducing rogue spend.
Current State of Procurement Purchasing Across Portcos
The use of siloed procurement technology such as SAP Ariba Snap is common among many portfolio companies.
Expense reports are also the norm. Cost optimization processes remain at the individual portco level leading to missed opportunities, compliance issues, and a significant reduction in savings for PE firms as a whole.
PE firms may feel overwhelmed by the complexities of cross-portfolio sourcing and may face resistance to a centralized approach by portco-level executives.
Problems With Procurement Purchasing at the Portfolio Company Level
Purchasing at the portfolio company level wastes time and resources across the board.
If purchasing is happening at this level, it is likely that deals have also been negotiated piecemeal, missing the opportunity to leverage group buying power as well as consuming employee hours across each individual organization for a process that only needed to occur once.
Data is siloed between portcos and, because of this, there is a major lack of spend visibility which also results in its own savings reductions.
Compliance issues such as rogue purchases can quickly arise when purchasing occurs at the portco level instead of in a controlled, centralized, PE environment with full cross-portfolio spend visibility.
Purchasing at the portco level results in:
- Lack of controls
- Inability to enforce negotiated rates / prices
- Rogue purchases
Savings lost due to purchasing at the portco level equates to 2-4% of spend.
Benefits Of Purchasing at The Private Equity Level
The most obvious benefit of purchasing at the private equity level is savings. Purchasing at the PE level allows for strategic choices that result in obtaining the lowest possible price.
These prices are only available due to PE-level spend analysis which allows for the identification of spending patterns that could lead to potential deals.
This leads to the PE firm’s ability to effectively source and leverage group buying power to purchase at the best rates and prices.
By completing the entire procurement journey at the PE level utilizing a private marketplace, PE firms can achieve an expected >%4 spend savings achieved across portcos.
This is a quick and sizable win for PE firms struggling to meet requests for procurement savings—a notable, even trendy area of critique among PE firms in recent years.
Additionally, rogue spend becomes more apparent in this model and quick action can be taken.
How The Private Marketplace Model Enhances PE-Level Purchasing
Using a central, PE-level procurement marketplace, PE firms are able to ensure that items and services are being obtained at the lowest prices possible resulting in enforceable savings. Because portcos retain some procurement autonomy with full approval controls at the portco level, the switch to a PE-led procurement model becomes smoother.
Premikati also offers change management solutions to guide each portco’s adoption. Because PE Marketplace sits alongside other technologies—it is a non-integrated solution—portcos can continue to use additional technologies as they see fit.
On the PE side of the equation, PE Marketplace offers the ability to easily remove portfolio companies from the system within minutes if divested.
The addition of new portcos takes only a few short days and is based around the company’s current eprocurement solutions.
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