US Eye

Unlike other consulting firms, Inside Consulting took us from identifying profit improvement potential to actually executing and ensuring the business realized the value. I would recommend them to other CFOs and I’ll be bringing them with me to any other jobs I take.- Michael Ames | CFO

Situation:

  • The business was growing rapidly, with the team adding dozens of practices within an 18-month period. Vendor consolidation on core medical items, technology stack, and SG&A were not yet fully consolidated.
  • The retail arm did not have a centralized strategy and controls on inventory or product portfolio. This led to purchasing items from 60+ vendors.

Insights and actions:

  • Applied a variety of sourcing approaches (direct negotiations, multi-round tenders, live-bidding events, and demand management) based on category and vendor relationship dynamics.
  • Identified core set of retail vendors to provide a specific set of products across the bulk of locations. Renegotiated steep discounts on customer display-case samples.
  • Identified pockets of spend in highly-compressible technology categories offering opportunity (e.g., high rate of functionality evolution / market share change + high vendor margins).

Impact:

  • Collectively, the profit improvement initiatives added $2.4M in EBITDA (25% spend reduction for categories in scope), contributing key margin improvement for the business.
  • Simplified operations of the retail business via SKU rationalization and developing structured offering set, reducing inventory by 20% while accelerating the customers’ order-to-delivery times by 50%.
  • Served as central PMO for savings initiative tracking, including both consultant and US-EYE led projects.   Identified drivers of savings and confirmed value delivery and/or reduced pro-forma projections as needed.  Reported results to Board and capital providers.
  • Consolidated vendors in a variety of categories, enabling deeper partnerships with these vendors and dramatically reducing the volume of monthly invoices for the accounts payable team.