Achieving your P&L savings targets requires constant search for cost optimisation potentials and hundreds of individual cost reduction and rationalisation projects. Here's where Meercat® comes into play - we can help you co-ordinate your global teams, easily create up-to-date confidence-level reports and share knowledge across your organisation. Furthermore, through a unified process you have an instant global transparency of the state of your preparations.
Commodity managers can control all initiatives related to their commodity, regardless of the business unit.
You can set-up global projects that focus on certain topic and let the team share the know-how required for quick implementation.
Unified confidence levels allow you to improve the quality of global forecasting of planned savings for the year.
LIbrary module allows quick and easy sharing of guidelines and case studies among employees involving in savings generation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.