Case Studies

Several years ago, PSI was contacted by a company that sought assistance with the development of an MWBE strategy. Their major customers were contractually requiring aggressive MWBE Programs to embrace diversity in their business plans to reflect the diversity of their customer base. Our client was anxious to address this customer requirement in its external supplier sourcing strategies, further complicated by a pending merger with a European firm. PSI was selected to develop an enterprise-wide MWBE strategy for the newly merged company.

Ron Payne led a Phase I consulting assessment by examining all external supplier spending and identifying the major commodity categories in which the spending was taking place. Several databases of MWBE were reviewed and recommendations were made to the client offering an aggressive sourcing strategy that increased the spending in year one by 777%. A further improvement of spending levels incorporated a 200% increase of year two over year one spending. The work on this contract demonstrates PSI's understanding of how to maximize resources and balance internal utilization with external capabilities and capacity.

A successful Phase I engagement resulted in the client's recognition of the PSI team's expertise. PSI provided a Staff Manager to implement the strategy with the newly identified MWBEs. This Staff Manager had completed much of the discovery and analytical sourcing work during the Phase I consulting project. Her services were therefore engaged in a Phase II project to implement the enterprise strategy by serving as the primary interface with the user/requestor organizations and the new MWBE sources. The client's buyers initiated purchase orders, however, the Staff Manager acted as the Sourcing and Contracts Manager.

During the ten month tenure of the Staff Manager, the user organizations were expanded beyond the manufacturing organization where the initiative began and identified a number of MWBE's capable of supplying goods and services to the client company. The work also included supplier performance monitoring, since the first supplier was a company that supplied customer ready manufactured product. Since this firm was supplying product formerly built inside the client's manufacturing operations, a close and careful monitoring of the supplier's cost, quality and schedule performance were critical to the success of the project.