Client notes
What people said after the pack landed
These are desks we have sat with. Names of organisations are withheld where the contract register is still politically live.
Helen refused to merge three labour agencies until we produced Companies House numbers. That delay annoyed me in week two. The briefing then showed we had been treating a single payroll provider as three “preferred” names.
HR buying lead · food manufacturer, East Midlands · spend visibility review
The facilities scorecard was blunt about invoice queries. Our contractor disliked the tone. Accounts payable liked having the query count on one page for the quarterly meeting.
Estates manager · further education college, Kent · vendor performance scorecards
Packaging volumes in the tender file were a wish. Priya’s deep-dive used actual call-offs from three plants and a fourth that had been buying film off a local merchant. We rewrote the volume schedule before going back to market.
Category owner · FMCG manufacturer · category deep-dive
Quarterly tracking is quieter than the first review. Useful when a new MRO supplier appeared in one depot and nobody had added them to the register. Less useful in a quarter where we changed finance system and the extract layout broke twice.
Procurement manager · builders’ merchant group · quarterly spend tracking
They asked us to strip cardholder data from a “sundry” cost centre before they would touch the file. Correct, and it cost us an extra week with IT. The maverick list was still worth the wait.
Finance business partner · charity with regional shops · spend visibility review
Longer accounts
Closed depot, live invoices
A multi-site retailer asked for a spend map before a facilities re-tender. The contract register listed two cleaning contractors. The ledger showed a third still billing a depot closed the previous spring. Goods-in records were irrelevant; the finding sat in cost centre codes that had not been retired. The briefing included the estates lead who had inherited the codes. The re-tender pack dropped the closed site and named the orphan contractor for exit.
On-time figures the warehouse did not recognise
A manufacturer wanted scorecards ahead of a packaging supplier meeting. The SLA counted “on time” from the promised week. The warehouse booked arrivals by dock slot. We scored both and showed the gap. The meeting used the dock-slot version because that is what the shift leaders already argued about. The supplier still disputed two rejects that were, on the photos, crushed in the client’s own yard. We marked those lines as contested rather than folding them into the average.