Purchasing & Procurement Analyses for Management Consultants

What is the aim of this course?

During Consulting Projects a lot of attention will be devoted to Purchasing & Procurement. Usually, this area generates big cost reductions and helps improve liquidity. Finding potential savings is not always easy and requires a well-organized approach to purchases done by companies. Luckily, there are a lot of techniques and frameworks that will help you in a structured way to look for savings and potential improvements in liquidity. In this course, I will teach you how to perform fast and efficiently different types of analyses in Purchasing & Procurement.

In the course you will learn the following things:

1. General information about Purchasing & Procurement.

2. Useful frameworks for analyzing Purchasing & Procurement.

3. How to find ways to cut costs in Purchasing & Procurement.

4. How to identify potential ways to improve your liquidity, especially quick wins.

5. How to estimate in Excel the potential impact of proposed changes.

This course is based on my 15 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting firms and as a Board Member responsible for strategy, performance improvement, and turnarounds in the biggest firms in the Retail, FMCG, SMG, B2B, and services sectors that I worked for. I have carried out or supervised over 90 different performance improvement projects in different industries that generated a total of 2 billion in additional EBITDA. On the basis of what you will find in this course, I have trained in person over 100 consultants, business analysts, and managers who now are Partners in PE and VC funds, Investment Directors and Business Analysts in PE and VC, Operational Directors, COO, CRO, CEO, Directors in Consulting Companies, Board Members, etc. On top of that my courses on Udemy were already taken by more than 182 000 students including people working in EY, McKinsey, Walmart, Booz Allen Hamilton, Adidas, Naspers, Alvarez & Marsal, PwC, Dell, Walgreens, Orange, and many others.

I teach through case studies, so you will have a lot of lectures showing examples of analyses, and tools that we use. To every lecture, you will find attached (in additional resources) the Excels as well as additional presentations, and materials shown in the lectures so as a part of this course you will also get a library of ready-made analyses that can, with certain modifications, be applied by you or your team in your work.

Why have I decided to create this course?

Performance improvement projects devoted to Purchasing & Procurement are fast-paced and require you a lot of hard work. You have to also master fast the basic information about a specific industry to provide the customer with relevant advice. Most firms, don’t give you the full toolbox that you need. This may lead to huge frustration during consulting projects devoted to performance improvement in purchasing, procurement, and a lot of inefficiencies.

Therefore, I have decided to create this course that will help students understand or refresh the main skills and tools that they need during consulting projects devoted to optimizing Purchasing & Procurement. The course will give you the knowledge and insight into real-life case studies that will make your life during a consulting project much easier. Thanks to this course, you will know what and how to do during consulting projects devoted to Purchasing & Procurement. You will master how to analyze data and draw conclusions from the analyses.

To sum it up, I believe that if you want to become a world-class Management Consultant or Business Analyst you have to have a pretty decent understanding of Purchasing & Procurement projects and analyses done during such projects. That is why, I highly recommend this course to Management Consultants or Business Analysts, especially those that did not finish business school. The course will help you become an expert in analyses of Purchasing & Procurement on the level of McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and other top consulting firms.

In what way will you benefit from this course?

The course is a practical, step-by-step guide loaded with tons of analyses, tricks, and hints that will significantly improve the speed with which you understand, and analyze the businesses. There is little theory – mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. Our intention is that thanks to the course you will learn:

1. General information about Purchasing & Procurement.

2. Useful frameworks for analyzing Purchasing & Procurement.

3. How to find ways to cut costs in Purchasing & Procurement.

4. How to identify potential ways to improve your liquidity, especially quick wins.

5. How to estimate in Excel the potential impact of proposed changes.

You can also ask me any question either through the discussion field or by messaging me directly.

How the course is organized?

The course is divided currently into the following sections:

• Introduction. We begin with a little introduction to the course as well as some general info on how the course is organized.

• General Information on Purchasing. In this section, I will show you the goals, KPIs, and typical problems that you can come across in Purchasing.

• Useful Frameworks for Analyzing Purchasing. In this brief section, I will shed some light on standard frameworks that you can use during consulting projects to analyze Purchasing & Procurement.

• Quick wins. During consulting projects, you will be pressed for time. Therefore, you have to identify quick wins that will help you achieve a big impact fast. In this section, we will see how you can do that fast.

• Make-or-buy analysis. Make-or-buy analysis is an extremely important tool that will help you decide in a rational way what you should do in-house and what to buy. In this section, I will show you how to use this tool in practice.

• Reduce usage. You can achieve a lot by reducing how often you use something or changing its specification. In this section, we will discuss in this section this area of savings.

• Renegotiate prices. Prices have a huge impact on how much we spent on purchasing. Therefore, if you address these issues properly you can achieve huge savings. In this section, we will see how you can approach this topic.

• Specification overview. One of the ways to determine exact requirements before you buy something is to create the so-called specification where you describe what is needed. In this section, we will discuss this method in more detail.

• Revise Investment. Many firms spend millions on investments to scale their businesses. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze investments if cash is a challenge. In this section, we will look at some examples of such analyses.

• Increase Cash. Purchasing Department can immensely help in increasing the cash position of the firm by lowering inventory, reducing costs, and extending payables. In this section, we will do a few analyses that will show you how to do them in Excel.

You will be able also to download many additional resources

1. Useful frameworks and techniques

2. Analyses shown in the course

3. Additional resources

4. Links to additional presentations, articles, and movies

5. Links to books worth reading

At the end of my course, students will be able to…

• How to conduct fast and efficiently analyses in Excel devoted to Purchasing

• How to find ways to cut costs in Purchasing & Procurement.

• How to identify potential ways to improve your liquidity, especially quick wins

• Analyze investments in Capex

• Conduct make-or-buy analysis

Who should take this course?

• Management Consultants and Business Analysts

• Managers working in the Supply Chain

• Analysts in the Supply Chain or Purchasing Department

• Financial Controllers

• Investment Analysts

• Startup Founders

• Project Managers

What will students need to know or do before starting this course?

• Basic or intermediate Excel

• Basic knowledge of economics

• Basic or intermediate knowledge of finance & accounting