In the January/February edition of Consulting
, we examined how American Express is formalizing a consulting business around the data mining and analytics it is performing based on its unique access to aggregated consumer credit card usage information. In a similar vain, PRGX (formerly PRGX-Schultz) is looking to expand its consulting offerings by data mining the aggregated data it has collected on the business-to-business transactions in the retail and healthcare markets as part of its profit recovery audit business. To learn more, Consulting’s One on One
sat down with PRGX CEO Romil Bahl. Bahl joined the firm a year ago. He previously co- founded Infosys and was recognized by Consulting
as one of the Top 25 consultants in 2007.Consulting: Why did you rebrand?
Bahl: Our heritage was built around our profit discovery group, which performed audits to uncover overpayments to vendors. Our business model consisted of us walking into a client and putting 100 percent of our fee on the table. We were purely in the business of identifying contracts in which the intent was not carried out. We were helping clients get a credit on their next purchase. They might be performing at 99.99 percent, success levels, but that .001 percent could be significant enough for us to make a good business out of it. We think we can be more than that. The reinvention of PRGX is an expansion of that notion.
Consulting: How are you expanding your offerings?
Bahl: As part of our profit discovery audits, we collected one million gigabytes of data a year and we mine that data for overpayments. Going forward, we are also going to start to identify other actionable insights. Our goal is to help clients with their purchasing, sourcing and all sorts of insights that can lead to incremental expansion of profits. This isn’t just analytics. The legacy business, the audit business, is about recovering dollars already spent. Our new offerings will be focused on helping clients focus on future profits.
Consulting: What kinds of companies are you targeting?
Bahl: Here, in the US, the market among retail company CFOs is relatively mature. Many actually budget in recovery every year. They expect us to find savings and they budget accordingly, actually assuming there will be errors. So, we come in and look at prior quarters or prior years.
Consulting: How significant are the savings you’re finding?
Bahl: We just finished working with a retail company in the office products space. Our findings, last year, were the equivalent of the average profit contribution of 46 of their 2000 stores.
Consulting: How do you transition from audit recovery to future-looking strategy consulting?
Bahl: The clients have been asking us for help. They’ve been coming to us, asking “What else can you do for us? How can we be in continuous improvement mode to prevent these kinds of annual overpayments? What benchmarking insights can you provide for us?” We think we can provide unique views and insight from their data. We get a wide set of data from our profit discovery audit clients, ranging from purchasing data from procurement to actual invoices to payments, to point-of-sale data. Because we are the only truly global player in this space, we have views our clients don’t have. And we believe there is value in getting those views.
Consulting: What’s the next step in your expansion plan?
Bahl: We’re starting to work on ways we can benchmark across an industry. We’d have to get additional permissions from our clients, but we’re in the early pilot stage.
