Our FM and property management team is at the forefront of industry developments and is constantly helping our clients benefit from the UK's mature FM market place and Europe's growing borderless FM model. 

We have trusted and well established relationships with all key integrated global and national providers and seek to embrace the collaborative nature of fourth generation outsourcing to identify and deliver strategic benefits to our clients’ real estate portfolio.  These benefits typically enable a client to restructure their property portfolio and subsequent internal delivery model, to ensure it is aligned to their current and future requirements of the business. 

By challenging an organisation to consider a more integrated strategic approach whether it be across suppliers, service streams or borders, Proxima is often able to deliver sizeable financial returns of up to 20% and improvements in service performance, compliance & staffing structure, even in the most mature of property aware clients.

We are able to do this by providing deep commercial and technical insight into an organisation’s requirements, whether it be in:

• Sourcing an appropriate property management provider to optimise the acquisition and subsequent transaction costs of your real estate portfolio
• Sourcing and programme management of your capital expenditure
• Procuring integrated or disparate service providers to manage the soft and hard services of your estate on an ongoing basis
• Advising or managing TUPE compliant outsourcing of non-core FM / property services  

HR Services are an essential element of any organisation's ability to operate successfully. From defining organisational culture and employment brand through to attraction, development, retention, reward and management of talent, HR provides services for arguably the organisation's most important asset - its people.

Every organisation has proportionately significant spend in this area and each can benefit from Proxima's market knowledge and expertise in delivering best value services from the range wide range of sourcing solutions and suppliers operating in this space. With such a wide category scope and ever evolving legislative environment, HR Services is a highly complex category to procure and manage. Every organisation will face challenges around its HR spend on a regular basis.

Whilst consolidation of buying power is often a good method to achieve savings within HR Services, this often brings with it a number of key challenges. Challenges that often affect your people directly. The implementation of new processes, i.e. the way employee benefits are provided, results in the need for employee behavioural change. Exploiting rapid advancements in technology, i.e. through Vendor Management or Learning Management Systems, alters the way in which internal and external stakeholders interact. Implementing large scale programmes, i.e. Recruitment Managed Services or Process Outsourcing, fundamentally affects longstanding relationships and requires new ones to be established. Altering the supply chain balance from "supplier driven" to "client driven", i.e. ensuring that client rather than supplier terms and conditions are used, requires a shift in supplier relationship management strategy.

Proxima has a wealth of experience in delivering major change in HR Services spend management.  We relish the opportunity to interact with client HR and Operational teams to identify, realise and sustain procurement improvements.

The IT and telecoms markets are developing constantly and rapidly.  Issues such as unified communications, cloud computing, SaaS, technology convergence, and new outsource service delivery models are changing how IT is delivered and therefore purchased.
 

We find many IT Managers are unsure about what is fact and what is fiction, and what good value for money looks like for services. 
 

Our Category Experts focus on helping our clients understand what the market is really offering and delivering, how much to pay for it and the most appropriate commercial model for each situation.

Logistics is about physicality - the products are either there on time in full or they’re not.  The costs of failure are invariably high and in the past contingency was the answer - with buffer stock at every point in the chain.  Recent decades have seen these buffers challenged with the advent of ever improving IT to improve data capture, manage inventory, optimised vehicle routing and scheduling and the creation of cost models to identify resource trade-offs.  These developments, along with increased automation and vehicle design have driven significant cost savings.
 

These cost savings have been achieved against a backdrop of increasing factor costs and complexity:
 

• Fossil fuel costs continue to track well ahead of general inflation
• Complexity results from consumer demand and legislation
• Increasingly consumers demand increased product choice and many manufacturers find that more than half of their product is now sold on promotion
• Legislators desire to protect the community has resulted in employment protection legislation, more stringent driver and vehicle licensing, product quality guidance concerning shelf life and temperature control and recycling obligations resulting in significant return flows of goods
   

The cost savings to date have been achieved by correctly trading off transport and storage costs on a category, and in some instances subcategory, basis.  The upshot has been an explosion in distribution channel complexity and a blurring between traditional notions of primary and secondary transport and received wisdoms about the respective merits of in-house versus outsource activities.  Increasingly vehicle utilisation is coming to the fore, especially the scope for back loading.  For the first time major companies are actively engaging in horizontal collaboration to achieve both cost and environmental objectives.
 

In this complex environment simple rate negotiations, whilst important, are far from the full picture.  The real opportunity lies in restructuring solutions that deliver both cost savings and service level improvement.  A task that cannot be achieved without input from a raft of client stakeholders ranging from operational budget holders, marketeers, human resource professionals and those charged with financial governance.

The marketing and advertising environment is ever evolving with innovation and change at its core.  In many organisations we work with, there is a belief that due to its complexity Procurement doesn't 'get' marketing, and as a result the organisation fails to fully benefit commercially.  This is not the case at Proxima.  We successfully work closely with organisations to ensure that they are maximising the value of their marketing spend.  Our specialists marketing knowledge and experience enables us to offer deep insight in order to help our clients in their quest for value.
 

The digitalisation of marketing is something that many marketers struggle to keep pace with and the continuous development of new ways of talking to their customers makes it increasingly difficult for brands to know what is worthwhile and what is a fad.  We have a great deal of experience in the full spectrum of marketing disciplines but an area of distinction is our knowledge of the digital marketing environment.  With specialists who have worked with cutting edge brands across the world we are able to bring insight to our clients in this complex space which allows them to make decisions that help them to drive sales and brand awareness whilst maintaining value throughout.
 

Many of the projects we undertake are driven by a Finance Department’s drive to reduce costs.  Our experience enables us to work closely with clients' marketing leaders to create and implement plans to drive value that answers the Finance Department’s needs.  We invariably act as a conduit between Marketing and Finance functions to help overcome internal challenges and successfully deliver the value they need from this crucial area of spend. 

Print is an important medium in how you communicate with your customers.  Its position, in an increasingly multi-channel marketing approach, is one that is evolving.  Every organisation we work with faces many and varied challenges in print due to its technical nature, the numerous print production methods, technological advances and multiple ways of engaging with the supplier community.  Understanding this fast moving, diverse market place is a major challenge. 

Much of our work involves consolidating fragmented print spend, to bring control and visibility to large organisations.  Increasingly, however, we are helping our clients as they embark on transformational journeys.  Deep category expertise is being used to assist Marketing Departments as they look to take advantage of leading edge print on demand solutions.  These often make use of data relating to individual customers to enable more dynamic and targeted messages, and are frequently being developed as part of wider digital media strategies encompassing other media such as email and SMS.

For some organisations, print is increasingly being viewed in a broader sense, as part of a wider Print and Document Management category.  This requires us to work closely with IT, Marketing and FM to ensure benefits are delivered across this cross functional environment.  The trend of focusing more on an individual customer, and his/ her journey (from acquisition, to renewal,  etc.)  places specific demands on print and we are well placed to assist organisations in getting the greatest return on investment and driving efficiency across the whole landscape.

At Proxima we recognise the value that external advisers can bring to a business, after all part of our own core offering is professional advisory. Used appropriately, providers of professional services can help organisations reduce costs, mitigate risks, maximise their sales revenues and drive improvements in products, service levels or efficiency. However, we're also painfully aware that many advisers or consultants can seem only too ready to steal your watch just to tell you what time it is.

Buying professional services is not a straightforward process:
 

• You're essentially buying knowledge or scarce specialist skills, that often depend on specific individuals to deliver them
• The market value of these skills is therefore often intangible or very difficult to measure objectively
• The stakeholders are often the most senior individuals in a business
• The outputs you're looking for are often difficult to measure or even to define at the outset
• The potential value of the deliverables usually far outweighs the cost of the services themselves

All of these factors mean that it is critical for buyers to understand the needs and objectives of their stakeholders and to manage relationships with providers sensitively. Focussing on these issues can dramatically improve the quality of deliverables, the benefits created by external advisers and the total cost of projects and programmes. Get it wrong, however, and at the very least you will alienate both internal stakeholders and the providers themselves and at worst expose your organisation to increased costs and risks, project delays, organisational disruption or simply wrong decisions.

The successful procurement of professional services is therefore not all about negotiating the daily rate card of service providers, although in the right circumstances this can be part of the total solution. We work closely with our customers to understand their needs and the context in which they work with their professional service providers. The proposals we have helped them to implement range from benchmarking current costs and service levels, defining the policies and processes by which providers are engaged, selecting and negotiating framework and project agreements with preferred suppliers, through to creating the environment for the effective long-term strategic management of key providers.

Recent projects have covered legal services, statutory and internal audit, financial advisers, management consultancy and specialist technical consultants with a range of both public and private sector clients.

Travel is firmly on the radar of companies which are looking to improve their cost management, but often organisations are unsure about the scale of the opportunity and how to get travel under effective management. We can help.

Travel is the lifeblood of many businesses, often critical to growth and often emotional. The needs and welfare of the individual have to be balanced with the objectives and policy of the organisation. However, organisations often fail to distinguish between essential travel that adds value and delivers a return on investment, and travel that is simply a cost.  In this context, deciding what represents good value from a travel purchase can therefore be a near impossible challenge.

Every organisation faces many and varied challenges, such as:
 

• Understanding how pricing changes in the market
• Operating in a world of multiple sourcing options
• Dealing with hundreds, if not thousands, of travellers
• Assessing whether you are getting the best possible price
• Knowing whether your processes and use of technology are effective
• Successfully implementing policy changes, especially when you don't know how to quantify the benefits
• Keeping abreast of change in the market, and knowing what is leading edge

We work with organisations to assess the practices and generate the scope of opportunity across all the key sub categories such as rail, air, accommodation, events and conferencing using our deep category knowledge and experience. Benefit can be delivered through an assessment of services and costs of the agencies used or the price of hotels or air tickets purchased. Or the solution could be more strategic and the solution needs to radically change culture and ways of working.
 

Travel touches on numerous areas of the business, be it HR through policy work, FM or Fleet when reviewing taxis or car hire or Marketing when reviewing events. We can draw on the experience of our colleagues in these other categories and also our strong relationships with key suppliers in the market place to ensure you have the best possible category strategy in place.