The CFO's request seemed straightforward enough: "Tell me exactly what we're spending with suppliers, and where we're wasting money." Simple question. The procurement director knew immediately that answering it would be anything but simple.

Manufacturer X had grown through acquisition, absorbing three smaller companies over a decade. Each acquisition brought its own supplier relationships, its own systems, and its own way of recording purchases. The result was a tangled mess of data spread across four ERP systems, multiple spreadsheets, and several thousand invoices that had never been properly categorised.

Nobody actually knew what they were spending. And that ignorance was costing them a fortune.

The Data Discovery

The first step was simply getting all the data in one place. This proved harder than expected. Purchase orders lived in SAP for two divisions, Oracle for one, and a legacy system that nobody quite remembered installing for the fourth. Accounts payable data was slightly better consolidated, but supplier names were recorded inconsistently—"ABC Ltd," "A.B.C. Limited," and "ABC Company" might all be the same supplier, or might not.

The spend analysis platform they implemented could ingest data from all sources, but cleaning it required human judgment. They spent three months—far longer than planned—normalising supplier names, categorising spend into a consistent taxonomy, and reconciling discrepancies between purchase orders and invoices.

What emerged was the first accurate picture of spending the company had ever had. And it was alarming.

The Safety Glove Discovery

One example crystallised the problem perfectly. Safety gloves—a basic consumable item that every manufacturing site needed—were being purchased from twelve different suppliers at prices ranging from £3.40 per pair to £8.20 per pair.

These weren't different types of gloves. They were the same specification, the same quality, just bought by different sites from different suppliers at wildly different prices. Nobody had noticed because nobody had ever looked across the entire company.

When the analysis team calculated the total spend on safety gloves, the number was £340,000 annually. If every site had been buying at the best available price, the spend would have been £180,000. The company was overpaying by nearly 50% for a single commodity item.

Safety gloves were just the start. Similar patterns appeared across every MRO category: lubricants, cutting tools, protective equipment, packaging materials, cleaning supplies. The fragmented buying approach was costing millions.

The Hidden Duplicates

The analysis also uncovered something more troubling than price variation: duplicate payments. When they matched invoice data against bank payment records, they found discrepancies—invoices that appeared to have been paid twice.

Some were innocent errors: a supplier re-sent an invoice that had been delayed in the post, and both were processed. Others were more concerning: identical invoices submitted to different divisions, each paid without realising the other existed.

The total identified duplicate payments exceeded £50,000 in the most recent year. Extrapolating backwards, the company estimated it had lost over £200,000 to duplicate payments over the previous five years—money paid to suppliers for goods and services that had already been paid for.

The suppliers weren't necessarily acting fraudulently. In many cases, they probably hadn't noticed either. But the money was gone regardless.

The Consolidation Strategy

Armed with actual data, the procurement team developed a systematic consolidation strategy. They prioritised categories by spend and fragmentation—where were they spending the most, with the most suppliers, at the widest price variation?

MRO supplies topped the list. Across all sites, they were spending £8.2 million annually with over 200 different suppliers. The team targeted consolidation to two or three strategic partners per sub-category.

The negotiations were straightforward because they finally had leverage. Instead of each site buying gloves independently, they could offer suppliers £340,000 of guaranteed annual volume. Suppliers who had been charging £8.20 per pair suddenly found room to quote £3.10.

They repeated this process across categories: cutting tools consolidated from 34 suppliers to 4, saving 28%. Lubricants consolidated from 18 suppliers to 2, saving 31%. Packaging materials consolidated from 45 suppliers to 6, saving 22%.

The Full Picture

Twelve months after starting the spend analysis project, the CFO got the answer to their question—and it was better than expected.

Total annualised savings from consolidation exceeded £800,000. The biggest wins came from MRO supplies, but significant savings appeared across professional services, logistics, and facilities management as well.

Duplicate payment recovery added another £50,000 in the first year, with improved controls preventing future recurrence.

Process efficiencies—reduced invoice volumes, standardised purchasing processes, better supplier management—contributed an estimated £200,000 in soft savings through freed-up staff time and reduced errors.

The total benefit exceeded £1 million in the first year. The spend analysis platform and implementation effort cost approximately £180,000. Payback was under three months.

The Ongoing Discipline

Perhaps more valuable than the initial savings was the ongoing visibility. The manufacturer now had a dashboard showing spend by category, by supplier, by site, by month. Anomalies were visible immediately rather than buried in spreadsheets.

When a site started buying from a new glove supplier at higher prices, the system flagged it within the monthly review. When a supplier's pricing drifted up over time, the data showed it clearly. When someone requested a new supplier for a category that was supposed to be consolidated, the procurement team could intervene before fragmentation crept back.

The discipline of data-driven spend management became embedded in how the company operated. New acquisitions were integrated with spend visibility as a priority. Contract renewals were informed by actual spend patterns rather than guesses. Supplier negotiations started with facts rather than assumptions.

The Lesson

Manufacturer X's story is not unique. Most companies that have grown through acquisition, expanded organically across multiple sites, or simply operated for long enough without systematic procurement have hidden waste in their spending patterns.

The waste isn't usually the result of bad decisions. It's the result of no decisions—fragmented buying that happens when nobody has visibility of the whole picture. Every individual purchase might seem reasonable. The aggregate pattern is often anything but.

Finding that waste requires investment: in data integration, in analysis, in the hard work of normalisation and categorisation. But the return on that investment is typically substantial and immediate. You can't manage what you can't measure—and most companies can't measure their spending nearly as well as they think.