Consulting Cost Reduction: Nordic Retailer

TL;DR: A Nordic retailer with around €2B in revenue and 15,000 employees was running a group cost programme with a €15M indirect spend target. Consulting was the least understood category — finance reported €22M; the actual figure was €32M. A structured review across three years of invoice data contributed €5.3M to the programme target and introduced governance that made the number visible going forward.

Background

The group CFO had initiated an indirect spend programme with targets across categories including IT, facilities, and professional services. Consulting had been identified as the category with the most uncertainty — each business unit managed its own supplier relationships, and there was no central view of what was being bought or at what rate.

When the programme team asked the finance function for a consulting spend number, the answer was €22M. Nobody was confident in the figure — it was assembled from cost codes that didn't consistently capture consulting, and it excluded spend that was classified differently at the BU level. The CFO's hypothesis was that the real number was significantly higher, but without invoice-level analysis there was no way to confirm it.

What we did

Spend discovery

We pulled three years of raw invoice data across all business units — not the pre-categorised finance data, which had already been filtered through cost codes that didn't reliably capture consulting spend. Working from invoices directly, we identified €32M in consulting spend: a €10M gap against the finance figure. The additional €10M was split between spend coded to non-consulting lines and BU-level spend that hadn't been consolidated into the group view.

Rationalisation and consolidation

With a full spend map in place, we reviewed the portfolio for duplication, unapproved spend, and rate inconsistency. Around €4M in engagements were either duplicating work being done elsewhere in the group or had been bought without following the group procurement process. A further €8M was fragmented across multiple small suppliers at rates that were 20–40% above what the group's preferred suppliers charged for equivalent work.

The programme team stopped or restructured the duplicate and unapproved engagements (€3.8M in annualised cuts) and consolidated fragmented spend into preferred supplier arrangements at renegotiated rates (€1.5M in savings).

Ongoing governance

To maintain the savings, we worked with the group procurement function to introduce a quarterly portfolio review and a spend threshold below which procurement involvement wasn't required but above which it was mandatory. The threshold was set deliberately low enough to catch the kind of fragmented BU-level buying that had created the problem in the first place.

Outcomes

€5.3M in forward savings, contributing to the €15M group cost programme target. Governance process in place across all business units. The consulting spend number the CFO can now produce is €32M — not €22M — and it's one they can stand behind.

What made it work

Three things. First, the CFO mandate had cross-BU authority — it wasn't advisory, and business unit heads couldn't block decisions made at group level. Without that, the rationalisation of BU-level spend would have stalled in every local conversation. Second, we worked from raw invoice data rather than pre-categorised finance data. The €10M gap was only visible once we stopped trusting the cost codes and went back to source. Third, group procurement already had relationships with the business units, which meant supplier conversations didn't have to start from zero.

This engagement was conducted before Scopecreeper existed — with a consulting team working across the group and business unit procurement functions over several months. It's the kind of work Scopecreeper now runs continuously, without the consulting team. Get in touch →