Nobody sets out to lose money slowly. It’s not how procurement failures usually happen in energy and utilities businesses. There’s rarely a single bad decision to point to. Instead there’s a rate card agreed two years ago that nobody’s revisited, a contractor whose insurance certificate expired quietly last spring, a contract renewal that auto-triggered because nobody flagged it in time to renegotiate. None of it looks like a crisis. All of it adds up to one.
This was roughly the position a UK energy business found itself in a few years back. It operates under a Smart Meter Communications Licence, regulated by Ofgem, linking smart meters in homes and small businesses with energy suppliers, network operators and energy service companies. Its Source-to-Contract processes were largely manual. There was no end-to-end visibility of activity, and reporting on spend at a supplier and contract level was patchy at best. As the business grew more complex, finance, procurement, risk and commercial functions all separately concluded the same thing: they needed better governance, better assurance, and a clearer line of sight into where value was actually going. That shared conclusion became a Business Accuracy Programme.
The fix wasn’t glamorous. Ivalua’s Source-to-Requisition platform became a single front-end for guided requisitioning, giving the business full breadth across procurement, commercial, risk and contract-based processes, integrated with their existing SAP environment for order and invoice processing and DocuSign for signatures. What changed wasn’t the fundamentals of how the business bought things. What changed was whether anyone could see it happening.
That’s usually the real story with value leakage. It rarely announces itself. A contractor’s rate card drifts out of alignment with what was actually agreed. A supplier’s risk profile changes and nobody’s watching for it. A contract obligation goes untracked until it becomes a dispute. Each individual gap looks small enough to ignore. Collectively, across a large enough supplier base, they become a genuine drag on margin, one that’s almost impossible to quantify precisely because nobody has a single place to look.
Closing that gap isn’t about adding more oversight or more headcount. It’s about making the information that already exists, contractor qualifications, rate card terms, contract clauses, supplier risk flags, visible in one place, so the questions get asked before the leak, not after the invoice.
We’ve spent years helping energy and utilities businesses build exactly that kind of visibility. It’s rarely the most exciting part of a transformation story. It’s usually the part that pays for the rest of it.
