In the two years since engaging Proxima’s services, they have provided us with greater visibility of our indirect spend and assisted us in achieving significant cost reductions across our European facilities.

Peter Brown, Global Purchasing Manager, AGCO

You brought a discipline, a sense of rigour and thoroughness of approach to Universal, without which we would not have been able to deliver such significant cost savings, and more importantly, we would not have been able to improve the underlying business process as effectively as we have.

Boyd Muir, Executive Vice President and CFO, Universal Music

3i has engaged Proxima for a few years now and our relationship has endured due to Proxima’s consistent delivery of high quality service and tangible results. They have a deep pool of procurement talent and category expertise that I can call upon and this enables me to plan for and meet demand across all categories of indirect spend. Overall they do a great job for us.

Lewis Claxton, Procurement & Property Director, 3i

Your people are committed, supportive and work with great professionalism and efficiency - and of course very well prepared on the subjects anytime. I am really pleased to be working with them

Nicolo Carpenada, Procurement Manager, Prudential UK

We have made major improvements to IT procurement. Proxima have been central to these enhancements.

Mike Wright, CIO, Man Group

In relation to our Leeds office recent relocation
Proxima has supported Four Seasons for the past 12 months and together we have built a partnership that continues to grow. This relocation to larger and more client-focused premises is a clear sign that the value that Proxima brings to clients is being increasingly acknowledged and an indication of a growing focus on indirect procurement among British industry more widely.

Kevin Roberts, Strategy Director, Four Seasons Healthcare

Proxima is always very professional and achieves the right results. Their people engage really well with our people, they communicate well, and ensure our people are bought into any changes that are introduced. They are very good at listening, and are always willing to challenge. Personally, I really appreciate the flexibility they show.

Ravi Hayre, Global Head of Procurement, DTZ

Case Studies

Our clients

Man Group plc
Man is a world leading alternative investment management business. Headquartered in London, Man is a global company with offices in 16 countries and approximately 1600 staff.
In 2009, Man and Proxima entered into a new procurement Managed Service contract focussing on Technology Procurement and related processes. Technology is a critical spend area for Man with effective technology being part of the backbone of Man’s business. The Technology Group (TG) consists of around 300 people spending circa $100m per annum.

The challenge for Proxima and Man was to move from the decentralized procurement approach towards a strategic model - with a greater focus on value, process efficiency and risk mitigation.

This included:
- Providing a diversified stakeholder base with greater access to procurement knowledge and management information
- Providing sourcing and category management expertise
- Helping build structure to core procurement related processes to bring both process efficiency and risk management.
British Airways
Siemens
3i
3i is a listed FTSE 100 international investor focussing on Private Equity, Infrastructure and Debt Management and has approximately 500 staff world-wide. It operates across 16 offices in 14 countries around the world with the head office in London. 3i has a small but well established internal procurement team. It has delivered year-on-year savings and manages suppliers to deliver the high quality services required by internal stakeholders. The size of business spend and the diversity of spend categories, however, created a challenge for 3i’s procurement team to manage cycles of demand and the breadth of category expertise required.

Proxima’s remit was to enhance the effectiveness of the team to meet demand, respond to new or varied category areas and to allow the team to better engage with the business to drive sustainable business benefit.
Wm Morrison
AGCO
British Council
BDO
Universal Music
Prudential Insurance
Prudential UK is a leading life and pensions provider to approximately seven million customers in the United Kingdom. It operates from two core strategic UK sites in Stirling and Reading. The Strategic Sourcing function was challenged to reduce external spend by £4million to support the group’s overall cost reduction target in order for it to be able to fund its desired investment in its identified areas for business growth.The existing Strategic Sourcing function was focused on sourcing new requirements and risk management related to existing third party relationships. It was felt that extra capacity and market expertise across a wide range of indirect categories would help maximise the chances of achieving the savings targets.

Therefore Pru engaged Proxima to focus on identifying cost saving opportunities in its cost base. Proxima replaced an existing service provider which had already had the opportunity to review all areas of spend.

The transition to Proxima had to be seamless from the stakeholders’ point of view. Initially the difficulty lay in influencing the mindsets and behaviours of the business stakeholders to be willing to consider different opportunities and business solutions for reducing costs without causing them concern that service levels and quality would be affected.
Allied Bakeries
Allied Milling and Baking is a division of Associated British Foods (ABF) plc, a major international business with a turnover of £10.2bn and close to 100,000 employees working in 44 countries. Before engaging with Proxima, Allied Bakeries’ Procurement Director had secured executive sponsorship to transform its function and drive breakthrough reductions in cost through best practice process driven procurement. This approach was highly successful across the businesses in key categories where in-house expertise was high.

Outside of the key categories, the spend is split over a high number of categories and the business had struggled to recruit or retain sufficient expertise to drive breakthrough cost reductions. To see the next step change in performance, the Procurement Director believed that higher quality stakeholder engagement and deeper levels of category expertise were needed in these untapped categories.

Allied Bakeries’ business philosophy is focussed on empowering its personnel and encouraging entrepreneurialism which means a high number of effectively autonomous sites and functions, which means the challenge facing Proxima was to deliver the benefits of centralised procurement, without centralising procurement.
Unilabs
Eaton
BG Group
DTZ