At a glance
- Business challenge
- Seventeen vendors, each ordered from separately
- Transformation focus
- One contracted account, one standard catalog, one request flow
- Procurement area
- Ordering and vendor management
- Outcome
- 17 → 1, vendors on one account
Case studyVendor consolidationIT services
Seventeen vendor accounts became one
An IT services company was ordering from seventeen vendors, each one separately. Nxtby moved that buying onto one contracted account, ordered through one standard catalog and one request flow.
Credited to: Head of Admin, enterprise client
17 → 1
Vendors on one account
BeforeSeventeen separate vendor accounts
AfterOne contracted account
The business challenge
Seventeen vendors, each ordered from separately
The client's Head of Admin described the starting point in one line: seventeen vendors, each ordered from separately.
Every one of those vendors is its own relationship. Each has its own way of taking an order, its own prices and its own follow-up, so the work of buying grows with the number of vendors rather than with the number of things bought.
That is the pattern Nxtby's own comparison describes for vendor-by-vendor buying: ordering over WhatsApp and email, pricing that varies by vendor, follow-ups the team chases, and accountability spread across every account.
“We consolidated seventeen vendors into one account and cut ordering time in half.”
The starting point
- 01Ordering: a separate channel for each vendor
- 02Pricing: set vendor by vendor
- 03Follow-ups: chased by the client's own team
- 04Accountability: spread across seventeen accounts
Before and after
Seventeen separate vendor accounts, then one contracted account
Before
Seventeen separate vendor accounts
Each vendor ordered from separately, through its own account.
- A need is placed with whichever vendor supplies it
- The order goes through that vendor's own channel
- Price depends on the vendor
- Follow-up is chased vendor by vendor
After
One contracted account
All seventeen moved onto one contracted account, ordered through one standard catalog and request flow.
- Requests raised through one standard request flow
- Items ordered from one standard catalog
- Priced on stable, pre-negotiated rate cards
- Nxtby handles coordination and follow-ups
17 → 1Vendors on one account
What Nxtby implemented
Seventeen relationships, folded into one
What changed was where orders go. The people raising requests, and the approvals behind them, stayed where they were.
Map the approval structure already in use
Nxtby maps the existing approval levels, departments and locations into the request flow, so there is no new tool for the team to learn.
Move the buying onto one contracted account
Purchases that went to seventeen separate vendors are placed through a single account contracted with Nxtby.
Standardize the catalog
Items are ordered from one standard catalog, priced on pre-negotiated rate cards rather than vendor by vendor.
Run every request through one flow
Nxtby sources, places orders, coordinates vendors, tracks deliveries and resolves issues: one partner, end to end.
Result
One contracted account
Outcomes and evidence
What the change produced
Reported outcome
17 to 1
vendor accounts
Vendors on one account
How to read this figure
- Definition
- Separate vendors ordered from before, against the single contracted account after.
- Period
- Not stated by the client
- Reported by
- Head of Admin, enterprise client
And in how the work runs
- Ordering moved from seventeen separate vendors to one contracted account
- One standard catalog and request flow in place of vendor-by-vendor ordering
- One partner accountable from request to delivery
Lessons and takeaways
What a procurement team can take from it
Start from where orders actually go
The story began with a count: seventeen vendors. Listing every vendor that receives orders is what makes a consolidation measurable.
Orders traced from the team to every vendor that receives them, then listed in one place. Vendor labels are placeholders. Consolidate the account and the catalog together
One account removes little work if every order through it is still a one-off. The catalog and the request flow moved with the account.
An account on its own still carries one-off orders. With the catalog and the request flow moved alongside it, orders follow one path. Keep the approvals people already use
Mapping the existing approval structure into the new flow changes where orders go, not who signs them off.
From the same request, the ordering path changes and the approval step stays where it was. Record the baseline before you change anything
The client reports ordering time halved. Without a measured before, that stays a client's account rather than a result anyone can verify.
A before and an after measured the same way make a change verifiable. Without the before, a result stays the client's account.
Diagrams are schematic and illustrate each lesson. They are not the client’s systems or data.
Next step
Count your vendor accounts with us
Tell us how many vendors your sites order from today and how a request reaches them. We will show you what one contracted account would look like.
- No cost and no obligation
- No software rolled out to your teams
- No change to how approvals are decided
What happens next
You tell us how it runs today
How many sites you buy for, which categories are bought repeatedly, and how a request reaches a supplier today.
We come back with the picture
What one contracted position across those categories would look like: the catalogue, the approval limits and where ordering would stay local.
You decide what, if anything, moves
Most operations start with a single category at a handful of sites. Nothing is committed by having the conversation.