No. Every organizations’ needs are different. Some have tremendous internal staff that can benefit from the SupplierTRACKER tool, but have a minimal-to-zero ‘real world’ need for these additional professional services.
It is NOT our model to select suppliers nor contracts. Instead, we gather business information, assess, analyze and negotiate.
If we become aware of critical issues ranging from data breaches, quality control concerns, service slights or billing anomalies – we’ll alert you, investigate and share our findings.
We have no reason to ‘root’ or ‘recommend’ one supplier over another – that is for you to decide.
Our ‘favorite’ supplier? The one that you select and does a fantastic job for you.
However, we are prepared to help you make a short-list of ‘qualified’ recommendations.
Yes. We will work on a contingency or guarantee for projects that are focused on cost savings. When we quote a project, we base our project fees on estimated time and resources required to achieve our clients’ objectives – financial and non-financial. This model has allowed for our clients to see significant ROIs on our fees while securing solutions that provide value beyond just dollars saved. In the past three years, maybe 15% of all projects have been savings-based.
This is a fair question, as often times suppliers fear the loss of profit margin when agreements and programs are scrutinized by purchasing professionals.
In our experience, most suppliers DO enjoy working with CATALYST. In fact, we have been recommended to clients by suppliers who have NOT won the business on a project, as they felt our processes are “fair and well researched”.
Having former sales professionals on staff, we understand a supplier’s position in the process.
We treat every supplier with absolute respect and communicate thoroughly with them on every project. We will NOT push for unreasonable requests or attempt to secure a deal that is ‘bad’ for the supplier – as those deals will often cause problems in the near future (for the client).
No, in fact, NEVER. Our services and tools are designed to support these professionals – NOT replace them. It is likely that there are key items your internal purchasing department understands (relationships, culture, fit, politics, change management, etc.) that our team simply can NOT understand as an outside entity.
CATALYST clients who do NOT have internal purchasing personnel will often use our On-Demand Services in staffing and project management type role as needed.
SupplierTRACKER is a single-point, secure repository that proactively tracks your various supplier documents.
Examples of documents include contracts, price tariffs, W9 forms, certificates of insurance, professional certifications, and procurement-related documents (Requests for Quotes/Bids, negotiation notes).
While CATALYST is confident in the security of the data stored, we do NOT recommend storing documents containing social security numbers, patient-specific medical data, banking data, or credit card data.
The pricing benchmarks in Supplier Tracker come from a variety of sources, including sourcing projects by Catalyst, supplier-provided, and system averages. These are all ACTUAL marketplace numbers that have been confirmed by Catalyst from reputable, solvent suppliers.
This measure is to honor a level of confidentiality owed to every supplier. We modeled the ability to compare pricing based on online retailers. We modeled the presentation of the data in a similar fashion to the ‘blind bid’ offers on travel sites (you are provided some identifying data to help you determine if the benchmark is applicable to your organization and purchasing specifications).
Data security is very important to CATALYST. All data stored in SupplierTRACKER is password protected and protected by five layers of firewall. Data is backed up in triplicate, daily to Dallas, and on a weekly basis to data centers in both Boston and Los Angeles, to allow for recovery if needed.
