Post-Merger Supplier Consolidation: Infrastructure Company

TL;DR: After acquiring a competitor, an infrastructure company inherited two separate consulting supplier bases with significant overlap. Scopecreeper mapped both portfolios simultaneously, identified duplicate engagements worth £6M, and produced a consolidation plan that reduced the combined supplier count by 40% within 90 days of the acquisition closing.

Background

[Placeholder] The client is a UK infrastructure company that completed the acquisition of a regional competitor in Q1 2026. The combined entity had operations across six regions and a consolidated revenue base of approximately £1.4B. Both businesses had used consulting firms extensively — the acquirer primarily for operational improvement and procurement transformation, the acquired business for regulatory compliance and capital project delivery.

In the first weeks post-close, the integration team identified that the two businesses had engaged a number of the same consulting firms — often for similar types of work, under different contracts, at different rates. The scale of overlap was unknown. Getting a combined view from two sets of finance systems, two sets of procurement records, and two sets of project leads was expected to take months.

What Scopecreeper did

[Placeholder] Scopecreeper ingested invoice and contract data from both entities in parallel. Within two weeks, a combined engagement map had been built covering 83 active supplier relationships and approximately £19M in annual combined consulting spend. Engagements were tagged by work type, supplier, region, and business unit to enable like-for-like comparison across the two legacy portfolios.

Overlap analysis identified 22 cases where both entities were engaging the same supplier for broadly equivalent types of work. In 11 of these cases, the rate differential between the two contracts exceeded 20%. In 4 cases, the same deliverable was effectively being produced twice — once for each legacy business — with no plan to consolidate the outputs.

Outcomes

[Placeholder] Scopecreeper produced a prioritised consolidation plan for the integration team: which supplier relationships to merge, which contracts to terminate, which rates to renegotiate to the more favourable terms, and a sequencing that could be executed within the first 90 days without disrupting active delivery.

Acting on the plan, the client reduced its combined supplier count from 83 to 50 — a 40% reduction. Duplicate engagements worth £6M were eliminated. For the 11 rate-differential cases where relationships were retained, contracts were renegotiated to the lower of the two existing rates, producing a further £1.2M in annual savings. The integration team presented the results to the board at the 90-day integration review.

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