Reducing vendor spend
Asked to cut vendor spend for 2023, my department more than doubled the target in six months by letting anyone find the savings.
The problem
My department needed to cut vendor spend by 20% to meet the company’s goals for 2023.
How I thought about it
The key was letting anyone, at any level, contribute, not just me or my leads. More ideas meant we could be choosy: take the ones that saved money and made things better on time and risk, not just the ones that saved money.
What I did
I built a framework for evaluating opportunities. It let us compare ideas within a team and across the company. With more ideas coming in, we picked the ones that cut costs and improved things at the same time. We automated parts of people’s jobs, removed pain points and tech debt, and lowered the company’s exposure to risk.
I paired that with communication that kept teams focused on results:
- Weekly updates to the team and our customers on wins. (Our customers were employees outside my department.)
- Monthly and quarterly updates to the whole company on the progress.
Results
In six months we cut vendor spend by 49%, and we were still going. I could not be prouder of what we did together.
What I’d do today with AI
The framework did the real work: it let anyone score an idea the same way. Today I would put that framework in front of agents too, so every vendor contract gets a first pass and a scored proposal, and people spend their time judging ideas instead of digging for them. The weekly win updates would come straight from the verified results, not from someone compiling them by hand.