Buying organisation may increase its leverage with suppliers by concentrating spend. Supplier spend consolidation can take many forms as outlined below:
- Vendor base reduction: straightforward reduction of number of suppliers in any category
- Volume pooling: pooling cross organisational requirement until your order volume is high enough to attract new bidders/additional discounts
- Volume redistribution: making recommendations following spend analysis to move from one supplier to another
- Volume consolidation across categories: certain purchase requirements may be common across a number of categories. In the scenario, XYZ has combined different categories but closely related to office services into a larger contract so that they can increase their leverage.
- Standardisation and harmonisation of specifications: analysis of specifications and standards for a high spend purchased input, may show that there is a little difference between them and that the specification can be standardised or at least harmonised across the group or across national, regional or global operations.
- Forming purchasing consortia: buyers may decide to come together and combine their purchase volumes to attract better deals.
LO 1, AC 1.3