Most CFOs assume finding hidden EBITDA means a project or a significant disruption to the business to get there. The Procurement Impact Framework proves otherwise. It’s a comprehensive, data-driven procurement review built to benchmark your current costs and re-capture missing margin, without pulling your team off their day jobs.
In just 12 weeks the Procurement Impact Framework covers four stages:
1. Analyse & Clarify
2. Compare & Validate
3. Select & Implement
4. Monitor & Capitalise
Each stage exists to catch something the others can't, whether that's a risk worth closing or an opportunity worth capturing. Here's what each stage protects against, and what's involved for you and your team.
From your side, this stage is as close to hands-off as it can be. Your team hand over 12 months of invoices plus your existing supplier contracts. And that’s all we need from you. Our ERA category experts deep dive into your paperwork and using our benchmarking tools they ascertain the hidden value sitting in your cost base.
I've had clients ask why we need this detail, before I'm able to give them any useful insights. The honest answer is that the contract is where the real story lives. It shows allowable price increases, rebate triggers and entitlements that accounts payable staff aren't typically trained to look for.
You're probably confident you’re all across your cost base. Most CFOs are, and no disrespect, but most of you are wrong.
Not because staff have been careless, but because your finance team is working from what they believe is happening, not what's actually contracted.
This stage also plays a central role in procurement risk management, surfacing a second risk that has nothing to do with your own paperwork: supplier exposure. While insolvencies in 2026 have settled back down to long-run averages, the RBA Financial Stability Report still flags certain sectors as higher risk. Late payments just hit a six-year high, and CreditorWatch's CEO puts it plainly: the risk has "moved from macro pressure to measurable cash flow behaviour." So if your suppliers sit in higher risk segments like construction, hospitality, retail or transport our team check your exposure, not as a background concern.
There's no commitment attached to taking a look. If the review turns up nothing worth acting on, I'll say so, and you're no worse off for having checked.
Your team aren’t running the RFP themselves, we’ll handle that. Their involvement is inputting into a brief which ERA category experts will guide you through. Together we’ll pinpoint your requirements, even highlighting some criteria that you may not have considered for your business. That’s the benefit of utilising our team who are engaging with supplier in this category every single day.
Together we set KPI's that are specific enough to make suppliers a little uncomfortable. In practice, this means we go into more detail about your RFP requirements than you're probably used to. Why? Vague requirements signal to a supplier that you're not across the detail, while specific ones signal that you slick and expect efficiency. I've found that suppliers respond very differently to your RFP depending on which signal they get.
Your incumbent supplier is always invited to tender, and while we’re undertaking the RFP process nothing about your current arrangement changes. However, during this stage, our category experts can uncover gains from incumbent suppliers who have been coasting on an unchallenged relationship.
CASE STUDY
I had a franchise client whose marketing team was bogged down, manually exchanging campaign artwork with their print supplier, because of repeated spec mismatches. This typically took them 2-3 weeks per campaign, however the supplier had a ordering portal that could cut that time down to 1-2 days.
The portal had been proposed, but was deemed too expensive by the client, so the conversation had simply stalled. When I asked the supplier whether the account was worth enough to throw in the portal for free, the fee was reframed as a fraction of the total contract value and the supplier agreed on the spot.
In this stage, CFOs get an understanding of the untapped savings sitting on the table. 10-15% is a typical outcome for businesses that we partner with, and in cases I’ve seen savings results in the 30% range. That's the difference between assuming your current supplier is competitive and actually proving it. No two businesses are identical, but an untested supplier relationship is rarely the cheapest or the best one, it's just the easiest one that nobody's gotten around to challenging...yet.
Once all the proposals have been collected, our team review these versus your brief. We then present the best options back to you, ranking them as good, better and best. I find it's rarely all about price. The impact of changing suppliers is a key factor for some clients, perhaps account servicing, as well as add-ons like ordering systems or reporting capability are all weighed up. These conversations are fascinating, because a supplier with a clunky portal or poor reporting can cost you more in staff time than the saving on the invoice are worth.
The implementation itself sits almost entirely with your new supplier, not your team. Contracts, ordering systems and accounts payable all get realigned on their side, which means the switch happens with minimal disruption to your teams workload. That's a deliberate part of the framework design, because the value of a better deal disappears quickly if getting there costs you weeks of internal disruption to make it happen.
CASE STUDY
Going back to that franchise clients ordering portal. The portal setup and aligning it with the clients ordering and accounts payable systems, were all handled by the supplier. Six quarters later, the marketing team were spending their time generating campaigns instead of correcting artwork. Full campaigns that used to take weeks to prepare were running in days.
That's the risk this stage catches: choosing the option that wins on price today while quietly costing more in operational drag afterwards.
The first three stages find and lock in the EBITDA hidden in your business. This one exists because value that isn't watched tends to erode. Contract terms can typically start to drift or suppliers occasionally put a key line out of stock to push a higher margin substitute. A single non-contract purchase can sit unnoticed for months if nobody's specifically looking for it. Quarterly reporting catches these in the quarter, rather than after a year. That's the difference between a small correction and margin erosion that quietly compounds over time.
This is the lightest touch stage for your team consisting of a detailled quarterly report and a meeting. If there’s something that needs following up, we have that conversation directly with the supplier, not via your staff. You and your team are kept in the loop, not handed another job to do.
The goal of this stage isn't to keep your business dependent on outside oversight forever. It's to build enough governance discipline so that your team can eventually hold the line yourself. By working together your staff learn how your suppliers operate and the margin erosion that typically occurs in your business.
There's a second reason this stage matters that goes beyond catching EBITDA leakage, for businesses that have one eye on selling. Financial due diligence in business sales routinely find that a single unresolved earnings-quality issue can reduce EBITDA by 15 to 30% in a buyer's eyes, not because the number was wrong, but because it wasn't documented well enough to defend. A business that's been through three years of quarterly, structured reporting on its cost base walks into that conversation with an evidence trail already built, rather than trying to construct one under pressure during due diligence.
Four stages of the Procurement Impact Framework, four different risks, and one of the highest-leverage reviews you'll run this year. It's worth a look before your team moves onto their next priority. To find out more book a meeting and I'll talk you through what this looks like for your business.