Despite of its importance, cost analysis is often a daunting task for procurement professionals. In order to analyse supplier's costs effectively, procurement may need the input from other depart-ments. Normally, technical (or engineering) department may help them to identify the direct costs of the product/service (how much material is required to make the product, or how many people are needed to perform the job, etc), while finance (or accounting) department may have ideas on the overheads of the supplier.
In this scenario, engineering department may provide insights on the components needed and the tasks to perform. Similarly, finance may know how much supplier pays for the overheads.
On the other hand, while commercial agency and suppliers are external stakeholders, Sales and marketing is unlikely to provide valuable information in this case.
Reference:
LO 2, AC 2.3

Value analysis is a systematic review of the production, purchasing and product design processes to reduce overall product costs. This can be accomplished through a variety of activities, including the following:
- Designing products to use lower-tolerance parts that are less expensive
- Switching to lower-cost components
- Standardizing parts across product platforms in order to achieve volume discounts
- Altering production processes to minimize the amount of production cycle time, thereby reducing labor costs
- Introducing automation to strip labor costs out of the production process
- Altering product packaging to lower its cost while still protecting the product The process is not a wholesale attack on costs. Costs are only reduced when the result will not im-pact the perceived level of quality experienced by customers, or the level of customer satisfaction.
Reference:
LO 3, AC 3.4

Payback period is the time in which the initial outlay of an investment is expected to be recovered through the cash inflows generated by the investment. It is one of the simplest investment apprais-al techniques.
Since cash flow estimates are quite accurate for periods in the near future and relatively inaccurate for periods in distant future due to economic and operational uncertainties, payback period is an indicator of risk inherent in a project because it takes initial inflows into account and ignores the cash flows after the point at which the initial investment is recovered.
The formula to calculate the payback period of an investment depends on whether the periodic cash inflows from the project are even or uneven.
If the cash inflows are even (such as for investments in annuities), the formula to calculate payback period is:
Payback Period = Initial Investment / Net Cash Flow per Period
When cash inflows are uneven, we need to calculate the cumulative net cash flow for each period and then use the following formula:
Payback Period =A + (B/C)
Where,
A is the last period number with a negative cumulative cash flow;
B is the absolute value (i.e. value without negative sign) of cumulative net cash flow at the end of the period A; and C is the total cash inflow during the period following period A Cumulative net cash flow is the sum of inflows to date, minus the initial outflow.

Composing a compelling business case requires the proposer to write in the language of the approvers.
Generally, approvers are business executives or important shareholders whose major interest is the profitability of the firm. Business case proposer may embed the following contents:
- Return on investment: according to Investopedia, Return on Investment (ROI) is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. ROI tries to directly measure the amount of return on a particular investment, relative to the investment's cost. A business case would seem more attractive if the proposal is expected to have high ROI.
- Time to market: Time-to-market (TTM) refers to the time from which a company initially con-ceives a product or service idea to the point when the actual product or service is accessible to buyers in the market (Afonso et al., 2008). The speed at which companies can introduce products into the market is critical for sustaining competitive advantage, and the reduction of product development cycle time has become a strategic objective for many technology-driven firms.
- Customer satisfaction: Keeping existing customer to stay in the business can affect greatly on the profit margin of a firm. A new proposal that finds the way to innovate while keeping the current customers satisfied may gain the interest of senior management.
- Improving productivity: Productivity is the measure of how efficient and effective a firm is. Im-proving the productivity means that with the same or lesser input, better output is generated. In-creasing productivity also improves the profitability of a company.
- Risk management: Any business activity contains inherent risks. For example, for a mining company to be truly responsible, it must keep all of its workers safe, healthy and motivated, meet the expectations of the local community and government for the region in which it is operating, ensure it impacts on the environment positively if at all, as well as achieve the financial objectives set by its investors for both the short and long term. Managing risks well improves the production throughput and maintains customer satisfaction.
In the scenario, Robert is trying to convince the senior management to adopt e-procurement system by insisting on potential productivity improvement. This is the right approach. A business plan should engage and please senior management and directors. An appealing business case tells them how important things to the business (such as productivity, return on investment, customer satisfaction or costs) are affected by the plan.