From acquisition-led growth to group-wide procurement advantage for an infrastructure services provider

Following a period of rapid growth through acquisitions, a leading infrastructure services provider found itself managing a fragmented procurement landscape spread across multiple divisions. Limited spend visibility, inconsistent supplier management, and missed opportunities to leverage group-wide scale made it difficult to capture acquisition synergies and drive commercial performance.

Working alongside the client, Efficio helped build a centralised procurement function that now operates as a strategic capability across the organisation. 

The organisation’s various divisions operated with a high degree of autonomy, maintaining their own supplier relationships, contracts, and procurement practices. This structure limited the group's ability to leverage its scale, unlock procurement synergies, and make informed commercial decisions across the business. 

The operational goal of centralising procurement was only part of the client’s transformation ambition. The business wanted to establish a strategic procurement function capable of improving commercial performance across the organisation while supporting the integration of newly acquired businesses. 

Efficio embedded over 35 specialists working across commercial, finance, and operations to build the relationships, evidence, and capability that the client sought. 

The company’s divisions operated with a high level of autonomy and fragmented procurement practices. Rather than trying to impose centralisation, the team built a fact base of savings opportunities compelling enough to win voluntary buy-in to group-level optimisation. 

This required the creation of a sophisticated group-level spend cube, drawing on data siloed across separate divisional systems. To gain even deeper visibility into savings opportunities and group-wide spend than a traditional spend cube would provide, the team used AI to analyse broader data sources, including invoices and contracts. 

The visibility created through this analysis not only helped secure stakeholder alignment but also enabled the team to prioritise the most commercially significant spend areas and deliver value quickly. This included initiatives where savings would improve the client’s own margin, not pass through to their clients under certain contracts. 

The team created a bottom-up opportunity pipeline by combining historical spend data with insights from stakeholder workshops that covered upcoming projects, expected demand, and potential shifts in requirements. 

Alongside sourcing delivery, Efficio supported the integration of newly acquired businesses by helping assess procurement risks, review supplier arrangements, and identify opportunities to capture procurement synergies across the wider group. 

Throughout the engagement, the team built the foundations of a durable procurement operating model, including governance structures, category ownership, sourcing processes, and performance reporting.