Case Study: How Cambridge Management Consulting Helped Liberty Global with a Centralised Procurement Model

How we realised huge savings in annual costs

Liberty Global had grown rapidly, to the point where business in Europe, at the start of 2016, comprised some 12+ operating companies.

Those businesses, linked with a significant backbone network across Europe, provided the group with a significant opportunity to re-structure its telecoms procurement, leveraging the group spend.

The Challenge

From early 2016, supporting Cartesian who held a portfolio of projects with the Liberty Global group in Europe, the team took the lead in helping the client manage a suite of identified savings initiatives and develop a strategy for leveraging spend to achieve greater savings.

Our Role

• Acted as Programme Director for the existing savings programs, helping the teams refine their approach and ensuring that lessons learned in one group of companies was shared and replicated in the other companies

• Reviewed and renegotiated existing agreement to improve the commercial terms

• Provided guidance on centralising telecoms procurement across the group, based on the logic of a ‘plan globally, act locally where needed’ philosophy

• Led the development of a procured telecoms ‘product tree’ as part of the group’s deployment of Ariba software to assist with procurement, supply chain management and reporting business-intelligence information 

• Worked with the client finance team on mapping spend to the correct GL codes, so the end reporting was accurate and useful from both a finance and business intelligence perspective

• Trialled the new centralised procurement model by drafting and managing the RFP process for a new cloud-based Wholesale Voice Billing platform to be deployed across the group in Europe. This took a high degree of stakeholder management, as many of the group companies were reluctant to consider moving from their current, familiar supplier

Knowledge & Skills

• Detailed Program Management and reporting capabilities.

• Our knowledge of procurement models relevant to large pan-European telecoms organisations.

• Practical procurement skills including understanding market rates, contract review and analysis, negotiations and the drafting for approval of final agreements.

• Strong analytical and financial skills relevant to large and complex business structures.

• The ability to define, draft and manage end-to-end Procurement RFP processes across large and conglomerate businesses.

• Our knowledge of a wide range of telecoms products including voice, data and infrastructure.

Outcomes & Results

    1. Huge savings

The realisation of multi-million savings across the programme-managed projects.

    2. Deployment of Ariba

The relevant deployment of Ariba as a procurement tool for telecoms services.

    3. Road map

A road map for the implementation of a new, cloud-based, Wholesale Voice Billing platform that was scaleable and flexible with respect to the need for future acquisitions and divestitures.

    4. Centralised leverage and local procurement

A model that provided the best of centralised leverage and local procurement for telecoms.

    5. Complete handover

A complete handover of the work to the operational teams tasked with carrying it forward in the day-to-day life of the business.