One portfolio company accepting a supplier increase may not be material.
Eight companies accepting the same kind of increase can be.
That gap is the whole argument.
How indirect spend usually gets looked at
One company at a time.
Not because anyone decided that was best. Because that’s how the companies are organized. Each one has its own AP, its own supplier relationships, its own person who handles the category alongside four other jobs. Each one evaluates an increase against its own P&L, where it genuinely may not be material.
So each one says yes. Reasonably.
Tariff adders. Freight and delivery surcharges. SaaS bundles. Payment processing fees. Service minimums. All of it gets evaluated locally, and locally it all passes.
The pattern only exists above the company level. Which is exactly where nobody is looking.
The questions that change at portfolio scale
Which suppliers appear in more than one company?
Which of them got an increase accepted in more than one place?
Which fees have quietly become standard across the group?
Where are companies buying the same thing under materially different terms?
None of these are hard questions. They’re just not answerable from inside any one company, which is why they mostly go unasked.
Why the answers tend to be bigger than expected
Three reasons.
Repetition. The same supplier running the same playbook across eight companies produces eight small increases, not one. Each looks like a rounding error. The sum doesn’t.
Drift. Terms diverge over time — different volumes, different negotiating moments, different people. Two companies buying the same item on materially different terms isn’t a scandal. It’s just what happens without a shared view.
Stickiness. A fee only has to survive a couple of renewal cycles before it stops looking negotiable to anyone. Nobody owns removing it, because nobody owned adding it — it arrived in a letter during a busy month.
What this isn’t
It isn’t a sourcing event.
Running one more RFP at one more company doesn’t surface any of this, because the unit of analysis is still the company. What you’re looking for only becomes visible when spend from several companies sits in the same view, normalized enough to compare.
It also isn’t a consolidation mandate. Nobody has to switch suppliers or move onto a single contract for the pattern to be worth knowing. Plenty of it gets solved by renegotiating what’s already there — once you can show a supplier what they look like across the whole group instead of one account at a time.
Where this lands in a hold period
Cost work reads differently depending on when in the hold it happens.
Early, it’s margin. Late, it’s diligence — a buyer’s team will find the same patterns, and they’d rather find them after you did.
Either way the work is the same: get the spend into one view, find what repeats, and ask whether it should still be there.
The short version
Indirect spend at portfolio scale is less about running another sourcing event and more about finding patterns nobody sees at the company level.
The individual numbers look small. That’s the point — small is what keeps them from being looked at.
