The Challenge 🎯
Please note: To respect our customers’ confidentiality, we have anonymized any individuals or brand names associated with this success story.
In an ideal world, most organizations would leap at the chance to save hundreds of thousands of dollars. But how does $92,000,000 sound?
That was the successful saga for one US-based Fortune 500 company operating around the world in hundreds of countries. A business committed to creating life-changing technology by bringing together data, and artificial intelligence.
Summary
Challenge
Reduce expensive costs in a Fortune 500 company’s supply chain to ensure their ground-breaking technology is accessible globally.
Solution
Give the organization’s suppliers a voice with powerful ideation tools to collect, triage, and implement cost-saving ideas.
Results
200+ cost-saving ideas from 125+ suppliers in several product categories later uncovered a saving potential of $92M dollars.
When the medical devices giant reached out to us, they made their mission clear: “We need to reduce the expensive costs in our supply chain, allowing us to continue making our technology accessible to all, including underserved communities.”
Their development process wasn’t just expensive, it was long, grueling, and intricate. It involved thousands of suppliers worldwide. But if edison365 could help them solve these issues, the Fortune 500 group would reap huge rewards!
This was an inspiring goal, and our whole team was fully dedicated to bringing the customer closer to their objectives! After some discussions between our experts and their senior Sourcing Program Manager, they said this…
“We want to introduce a central tool for collecting cost-out ideas from the company’s direct suppliers. No one knows how to optimize the supply chain better than the suppliers themselves.”
This was great thinking, and both the organization, and our team, were able to identify some interesting ways that edison365 could be leveraged to achieve this goal.
Tip: “Cost-out” is the practice of reducing cost within the supply chain by adopting new processes or behaviors.
Before edison365 📉
Before we jump into exactly how this Fortune 500 company used edison365 to save 92 million dollars, we must understand what wasn’t working.
Collecting cost-out ideas was done with one confusing internal tool. Each business unit would use its own version, and this mishmash of Excel spreadsheets and Category Managers would be the downfall of successful ideation.
Manually tracking costs in a spreadsheet was causing a bottleneck, relying on hours upon hours of emails and meetings to communicate these insights.
At the time, the organization’s Program Manager was very aware of this issue, saying “We need a central spot where suppliers could submit cost-saving ideas and be informed as they passed through the approvals process.”
The Start of Ideation Success 💡
This Fortune 500 company not only leveled up its ideation management process, but they also invested in our expert customer success service. This gave them results-driven weekly one-to-one meetings with innovation expert Rob Toon.
These sessions were pivotal to making the innovation management process even more exciting and sticky for suppliers. The result? This customer was able to drive even more value with edison365.
“I have to give a shout-out to Rob’s team; having an expert resource in edison365 to help us innovate and add enhancements as we move along is great. He’s been very, very receptive.”
Finding $92,000,000 of Savings 💰
This is where the real magic happened with our innovation tools and this Fortune 500 giant. What started small, as a trial run, ballooned into 125+ suppliers all contributing cost-saving ideas. A network spanning several product categories and bringing something new to the table every time for this industry-leading powerhouse.
“It’s a very user-friendly tool. A big thing for me is the governance process; the fact that you can just toggle and move ideas easily from one phase to another, and you don’t need signoff. It’s literally just a click-and-drag.
Using edison365’s Power BI integration, the senior Sourcing Program Manager and his team of Category Managers were able to aggregate everything! All the data captured with edison365 helped the team make informed decisions and evaluate the ROI of new ideas.
Customer Success Manager, Rob Toon, and his team have worked tremendously hard to build bespoke reporting dashboards for this organization, delivering every insight their company president could ever need.
“Managers can individually go into Power BI, look at their suppliers, and then get an output. They now have the information at their fingertips to communicate with suppliers. edison365 were fundamental to understanding the software.”
The team is now even going back to projects that were in flight before using edison365 as the solution. This makes it so much easier to show the suppliers involved and the progress made. This also helps the team track the closeout from each supplier, all of whom must provide a certain percentage of savings each year.
$100,000,000 and beyond 🚀
The Fortune 500 company has some big plans for the near future. Not only are they identifying new suppliers and ways to boost engagement, but they also aim to build a better ideation pipeline, identifying more than $100 million in light-bulb moments.
There’s also a drive to move from the drawing board to implementation on some of their most promising opportunities; edison365’s latest upgraded tools and features can help make this happen.
Ultimately, it’s about finding ways to continue delivering life-changing technology around the world, and that fills the team at edison365 with nothing but excitement. 200 ideas, 125+ suppliers, and a sophisticated ideation process later, we believe this Fortune 500 organization is just getting started with our robust tools.
