Cobalt Procurement is the advisory partner finance and operations leaders bring in when sourcing has plateaued. We map every dollar leaving the business, run the negotiations your team has no time for, and stand up the category strategy that keeps the savings from quietly leaking back.
The finance and operations teams who hand us their categories
Most procurement programs stall because nobody owns the categories, the data is a mess, and the renewals slip through on autopilot. Cobalt takes the categories off your plate, cleans the picture, and hands back a system your team can run long after we leave.
We pull every invoice, card charge, and contract into one classified view of where the money actually goes — by category, supplier, and business unit. The version of the spend file your CFO will believe, usually for the first time.
For each major category we build a sourcing plan: the supply market, who really holds leverage, the right number of suppliers, and the lever to pull next. A roadmap, not a single auction that wins once and decays.
Senior sourcing leads run the RFPs and the hard conversations — benchmarked pricing, redrafted terms, walk-away points set in advance. We negotiate as your team, and suppliers feel the difference immediately.
We rebuild renewals and master agreements so price protection, SLAs, and exit rights are actually written down — not assumed. The savings you win in negotiation survive into year two and three.
Concentration, financial health, single-source exposure, and compliance gaps scored across your vendor base — so the supplier that fails next quarter is one you already had a plan for.
We leave behind the playbooks, the dashboards, and the trained hands. The engagement ends; the discipline doesn't. Cobalt's job is to make Cobalt unnecessary.
What a typical Cobalt engagement returns
Cobalt runs a deliberate sequence — diagnose, source, negotiate, embed — and every phase ends in a decision and a number, not a deliverable that sits in a shared drive.
We cleanse and classify your spend, rank categories by savings potential and effort, and come back in 30 days with a prioritized opportunity map and a hard estimate of what's recoverable.
For the categories we agree to tackle, we run the market: shortlist suppliers, build the RFP, benchmark pricing against what comparable buyers pay, and structure the deal before we ever sit down.
Senior leads run the negotiation as an extension of your team, secure the price and the terms, and document savings in a form your finance team can audit and book.
We hand over the category playbooks, set the renewal calendar, train your team on the approach, and stay on call so the second wave of savings doesn't need a second engagement.
Cobalt's leads have run sourcing across the spend categories that quietly drain mid-market and growth-stage businesses. Representative work, anonymized.
Rebid a fragmented carrier base into a tiered lane strategy with quarterly index resets. Took freight cost per shipment down double digits and ended the annual rate-increase surprise.
Consolidated overlapping tools, right-sized seat counts to real usage, and renegotiated multi-year terms with price caps — recovering spend that had crept up unnoticed for years.
Built a dual-source strategy with index-linked pricing that cut exposure to a single mill and stabilized cost through a volatile commodity cycle.
Standardized rate cards across staffing agencies and managed-service vendors, eliminating maverick spend and the markup nobody had been tracking.
Rationalized a long tail of facilities and maintenance suppliers into managed agreements with service levels that finally held vendors accountable.
Brought transparency to opaque agency retainers and media buys, restructured fees to deliverables, and clawed back margin hiding in the markup.
“We thought we'd already squeezed our spend. Cobalt found eight figures in addressable cost in the first six weeks, then negotiated most of it back. The findings report alone paid for the engagement.”
“What set them apart was that they negotiated as us, not as consultants parachuting in. Suppliers took the conversations seriously, and the terms they wrote held up at renewal a year later.”
“They didn't just cut a number and leave. They handed my team the category playbooks and trained us to run them. Two years on, the savings are still on the books and we run the next wave ourselves.”
We scope to outcomes, not hours, and most engagements are structured so our fee is a fraction of the savings we put on the table. No procurement software to buy, no per-seat licenses, no lock-in.
A fast, honest read on where the money is and what's recoverable.
We run the categories end to end and get paid on results.
An embedded sourcing function for teams without one.
Inside 30 days. Every engagement opens with a spend diagnostic, and you get a prioritized opportunity map with a hard, defensible estimate of recoverable cost before you commit to sourcing a single category.
That's the failure mode we're built against. We rewrite the contracts so price protection and terms are locked in, set the renewal calendar, and train your team on the playbooks — which is why roughly nine in ten dollars we save are still on the books two years out.
You get senior sourcing operators who have sat across the table and closed the deals, not a slide deck staffed by analysts. We negotiate as an extension of your team, and we charge against outcomes rather than billable hours.
No. We work inside your existing systems and spreadsheets. The deliverable is recovered spend and a function that runs without us — not another platform you have to license and administer.
The diagnostic is a fixed fee from $18K. Category sourcing is structured as a share of the savings we realize, so our incentive is aligned with yours and the fee is a fraction of what you keep. Fractional engagements run on a custom retainer scoped to the categories you hand us.
Anywhere spend is fragmented, renewals run on autopilot, or no one clearly owns the supplier relationship — logistics, software, packaging, contingent labor, facilities, and agency spend are where we most often find money hiding in plain sight.
Book a spend review and we'll show you, in 30 days, where the recoverable cost is and what it's worth — before you commit to a thing.