Earnings Assurance and Optimization: Stand Alone or Sourcing Project

The Opportunity Assessment

It is the rare company that has a fully integrated enterprise system and with it completely clean data. Most are struggling with multiple data sources in varied formats, thin internal IT resources, redundant and dirty data, individual spreadsheets, and image-only source documents.

The result is an unreliable view into the true state of the company’s spend, and impingement on sourcing efforts.

Our Opportunity Assessment uses our own advanced software to quickly filter our client’s data from disparate systems and build an accurate picture of the company’s spend. DFA takes the now-sourcing-ready data and crafts a plan to convert findings into savings for our client.

This service is available as a stand-alone offering or as part of our normal methodology when DFA is engaged to perform the entire sourcing project.

Audits

One of the key challenges of managing cost reduction is ensuring that the instituted program is delivering the expected results. All organizations share similar challenges: maverick buying, erroneous invoice approval, supplier overbilling, confusion arising from disparate accounting systems, new and untrained personnel, supplier variances from contract terms.

These savings leaks fall into three categories:

• supplier billing errors,
• failure to capture service guarantees,
• and company accounts payables process shortcomings.

Supplier billing errors can run as high as 10% and are quite common. DFA reviews all line item billing entries, the associated PO and contract, validates price changes and indexes if any, and compares the actual price billed and paid to the correct price. DFA prepares the documentation, submits to the supplier, causes recovery of the funds, and works with the client and the supplier to avoid repeated errors.

Every expense area, with some rare exceptions, is fertile ground for savings recovery and easily pays for itself.

Failure to capture service guarantees is a second opportunity to assure earnings. We have found an average of 9% failure rate for certain services.

Because the client must do these audits and pursue refunds, with already stretched staff members, these savings often slip away.

DFA is very experienced at applying its own software tools to even enormous volumes and months of data to retrieve these savings for our client.

Company accounts payables processes are the root of savings losses for many companies. Our seasoned audit consultants will not only find and recover duplicate payments but also will identify flawed processes, poor controls, and the areas of potential fraud.

These services are available as stand-alone offerings.