Client stories
What changes after a reconciled category map lands
These accounts reference specific engagements — concentration reviews, mapping projects, and briefing retainers — not generic satisfaction scores.
The category map from Cedar Path finally aligned our plant buyers with finance vocabulary. We still disagree on packaging consolidation timing, but at least we argue over the same numbers now.
Their supplier concentration charts exposed a single-source lubricant vendor we had normalised under four names. Renegotiation came later — the value was seeing the risk clearly first.
Quarterly briefings keep our board from re-litigating the same tail-spend debate. The commentary is concise; occasionally I wish for more plant-level detail, which they added after we asked.
Data handover felt demanding at first — they wanted clean exports, not screenshots. Once we provided them, the turnaround was faster than our previous consultant.
Case note: Hanma Precision Components packaging review
Hanma commissioned a Spend Category Mapping Engagement covering 26 months of indirect spend across two plants in Daejeon and Cheongju. Their packaging category appeared fragmented across nineteen supplier names tied to one converter group.
We normalised vendor records, produced a Pareto chart ranking converters by volume, and annotated a recommended consolidation sequence that preserved their food-grade certification requirements. Finance used the chart in a Q2 committee session; sourcing opened renegotiation in Q3 without re-running the analysis.
The CFO noted the readout ran ninety minutes — shorter than prior consultant decks — because every slide carried a stated question in the header.
Case note: Atlas MedDevice tail-spend triage
Atlas needed to know whether tail vendors in lab supplies were worth a formal sourcing event. Our Tail Spend Assessment quantified 11% of addressable spend across 340 vendors below KRW 2M annual each.
The written finding recommended deferring consolidation until after a planned ERP migration — a mild disappointment for their sourcing lead, but it prevented duplicate effort. They retained us for quarterly briefings to monitor the curve post-migration.