One procurement picture across 18 operating companies
An industrial services group running 18 separate operating companies had procurement activity spread across suppliers, contracts, categories, spend and business units, with no group-level view. It connected Proconomy to its existing enterprise systems through pre-built connectors, added contract lifecycle management and NOVA, and moved from reactive dashboards and manual analysis to exception-led management — without replacing any system of record.
- Sector
- Industrial services and engineered products
- Scale
- 18 operating companies under one group
- Scope
- Suppliers, contracts, categories, spend and business units
- Systems of record
- Retained and connected, not replaced
- Deployment
- Connected platform, no rip-and-replace
Eighteen companies. Eighteen versions of the truth.
The group provides engineered products and industrial services to customers in critical industries. Procurement was not broken in any single company. It was that eighteen companies each ran their own suppliers, contracts, categories and spend, and nobody could see across them without somebody building a spreadsheet first.
The brief was explicit on one point: strengthen procurement operations without replacing the enterprise systems already in place.
What the group actually asked for
Not "digital transformation". Four specific things a CXO could not get an answer to on a Tuesday.
- Group-wide visibility of procurement activity across every operating company.
- A way to manage supplier and contract risk before it turned into an event.
- Sourcing opportunities identified from the data rather than from memory.
- Less reliance on reactive dashboards and manual analysis to answer routine questions.
Six things in the way. Each one specific.
Fragmented procurement visibility
Activity was distributed across multiple operating entities with no consolidated view.
Manual analysis of everything
Spend, suppliers, contracts and sourcing opportunities were assembled by hand, each time they were asked for.
Limited supplier categorisation
Without consistent categorisation there was no category-level spend insight to act on.
No central contract position
Expiry, renewal, obligation and approval visibility lived wherever the contract had been filed.
Consolidation opportunities stayed invisible
Where several companies bought the same thing separately, nobody could see it, so group-level negotiation never started.
Risk concentration was unknown
Supplier risk, concentration and single-source exposure were not measured across the group.
What was implemented. Connected, not replaced.
Connected to what already existed, rather than replacing it. That was the condition, and it shaped the whole approach.
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01
Connected through pre-built connectors
Bidirectional synchronisation with the existing enterprise systems. No rip-and-replace, and the systems of record stayed where they were.
See how this works -
02
Connected Source-to-Pay workflows
RFQs, awards, purchase orders, receipts, invoices and payments running as one sequence instead of six disconnected stages.
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03
Contract lifecycle management
Contract import, approvals, eSign, obligations, renewals, risk visibility and linkage to the purchase orders that use each contract.
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04
NOVA for live answers
Questions answered across purchase orders, contracts, suppliers, spend, invoices and agent outputs — without waiting for a report to be built.
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What changed. Stated as outcomes.
What the group can do now that it could not do before.
One view, eighteen companies
The CXO opens one screen and sees procurement across the whole group. No one builds it first.
The team works exceptions, not spreadsheets
Routine analysis runs itself. Buyers spend their day on what broke, not on assembling the report that shows what broke.
Renewals stop arriving as surprises
Expiries, obligations and commitments sit against the contracts and purchase orders that use them, and surface before the date.
Consolidation gets evidenced, not argued
Where several companies buy the same thing from different suppliers at different prices, the group can now see it — and take it to the table.
Concentration is visible before it becomes an event
Single-source exposure and supplier risk are measured across the group rather than discovered inside one company.
Every system of record stayed
The ERP was never touched. Intelligence and execution were added on top of it.
This will sound familiar. If any of these are you.
- Your group runs several operating companies and each has its own way of buying.
- A group-level spend question takes days because somebody has to build the answer first.
- You know consolidation opportunities exist but cannot evidence them.
- Replacing your ERP is not on the table, and any proposal that requires it is dead on arrival.
The questions we get asked. Answered straight.
No. Proconomy connected to the existing enterprise systems through pre-built connectors with bidirectional synchronisation. Preserving those systems was a stated requirement, not a compromise reached later.
The connectors carry existing purchase order, contract, supplier and spend data, so the group view builds from history rather than starting empty. Scope, entity count and data quality set the pace, and we scope all three before quoting a date.
It matters wherever group policy has to coexist with local authority, which starts at two. Eighteen made the fragmentation harder to ignore, not harder to fix.
No, and that is the point. Group rules are encoded once and applied centrally, while each entity keeps its own approval authority, thresholds and supplier base. Standardising the policy does not mean standardising how eighteen businesses operate.
The same problem, at your scale
Every group that runs more than one operating company arrives at the same place: policy that exists on paper, applied differently in every plant, evidenced by whoever happens to remember. Bring us the workflow where that costs you the most, and we will run it against your rules.
Someone from client success replies, not a sales sequence. If we are not a fit we will say so on the first call.
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