Unified Global Process

Meercat allows companies to have a unified global process for tracking and managing of Savings Initiatives with all the entailing benefits:

  • Comparability of savings across business units
  • Common global reports of savings targets and their achievements
  • Find out the laggards and identify potential quick wins
  • Share know-how among business units, so that they can learn from their own experiences

Transparency and compliance

  • Detailed log of changes to the business case, values for each confidence level archived without ability to change
  • Access historical status reports as they changed, day-by-day
  • Flexible approval process to obtain sign-offs from all key stakeholders
  • Repository of all associated calculations and documents

Commodities

Commodity managers can control all initiatives related to their commodity, regardless of the business unit.

Projects

You can set-up global projects that focus on certain topic and let the team share the know-how required for quick implementation.

Confidence Levels

Unified confidence levels allow you to improve the quality of global forecasting of planned savings for the year.

Library

LIbrary module allows quick and easy sharing of guidelines and case studies among employees involving in savings generation.

Supporting you at every step of the process

The system guides the users through the process, so that they can concentrate on the content / business case.

Automatic assignment of teams, validation checks and reminders both unburden the users and allow tight control of the process.

1 Brainstorm

Brainstorming sessions result in a lot of identifies ideas that need to be validated before they can be even seriously considered. Meercat® allows you to create DRAFTS of savings ideas that are visible only to the immediate team and do NOT COUNT towards the financial reports. In this way you can follow your ideas from conception in one platform, without generating undue confusion in the official reports.

2 Assign team

We know that savings are often generated in topic-oriented teams. When you assign a project to a team, the system can copy over the required project members as responsible for the individual savings initiative. People can also be auto-assigned to sign-off the initiative at respective quality gates.

3 Assign tasks

Each confidence level is often related to a number of fixed tasks, such as creation of a business case, supplier search and RfI, etc. Meercat allows you to prepare contextual task packages that are both Business Unit, Context (direct/indirect/logistics), Lever and Commodity specific. In this way you can prepare a set of task related to switching a logistics supplier or the redesign of mechanical components. In this way you can guide your employees as to the required internal discussions, approval, etc.

4 Prepare business case

Meercat allows you to create simple business cases for savings to track the progress of the initiative. If the default templates are not enough, you can attach any number of documents to each initiative to further elaborate your calculations.

5 Maturity Levels ...

The so-called Maturity or Confidence Levels are the equivalent of Quality Gates in the savings world. This allows you to quickly see how mature your saving is – after all an Idea that you can save 50.000 EUR through a supplier switch is not directly comparable in value to a signed contract that eachieves exactly the same target.

... and sign-off

Signing off your initiative at each confidence level ensures that it meets all the requirements to go forward. Approvers can include the team leader, senior management, finance or even other stakeholders such as Workers’ Council, HR, etc. It’s up to you to decide.

Flexibility built into the software

Unified process does not mean inflexible process. We understand that some processes may be to complex for simple savings scenarios. That’s why we allow clients to pre-define mandatory and optional steps based on both the savings lever used and the the business context of the savings.

In this way you can demand completing all confidence levels in case of a switch of a production supplier and, on the other hand, only require 2-3 steps in case of renegotiation of office cleaning provider.

Finally, if your organisation cannot agree on single savings tracking methodology, you can run multiple independent instances of Meercat on one server. This allows you to have completely different naming convention and processes within a single licence of the application.