← The framework
Cost Efficiency Supply and Procurement Technology and Automation
Agent&Capital  ·  Where Cost Efficiency deploys first

Contracts, vendors, assets and licences

The four domains where Cost Efficiency is captured first: the fastest, most auditable EBITDA in the business. Read-only, evidence-backed, and live in 25 days on the systems you already own.

The fastest bankable EBITDA

Four domains,
one read-only sweep

These four are where leakage is largest and the evidence already exists: in the company's own contracts, invoices, identity directory and asset records. Every finding traces to a P&L line, and nothing in the business has to change for it to surface. It is the lowest-disruption, highest-certainty value in the portfolio.

£900K
Contracts: from a 3% price-variance enforcement on £30M of addressable spend.
Illustrative; see note below
£1.0 to 2.4M
Vendors: from consolidation across a £20M addressable spend base.
Illustrative
£400 to 750K
Assets: ghost-asset elimination on a £5M hardware and maintenance base.
Illustrative
£200 to 600K
Licences: unused-licence reclamation on a £2 to 4M software base.
Illustrative
The four optimisation domains

Where the money sits,
and how it is recovered

Each domain has the same shape: a structural problem, a read-only sweep that quantifies it, and a direct line to EBITDA. The agents validate what the records claim against what is actually true, and certify every pound with a human before it counts.

01 · Contracts  ·  Supply and Procurement

Dormant value locked into the P&L

30 to 40% of addressable spend has no active contract, and the contracts that exist carry unclaimed rebates, missed early-payment discounts, evergreen auto-renewals and price escalations that were triggered but never challenged.

What we find: a contract leakage register (invoiced versus contracted rate), unclaimed rebates, and evergreen renewals intercepted before the notice window closes.

On £30M spend: ~£900K from 3% variance enforcement, £150 to 400K in rebates, £200 to 600K of evergreen waste prevented.

02 · Vendors  ·  Supply and Procurement

Fragmentation forfeits leverage

Business units procure independently, the same supplier appears under several names, and nobody holds the aggregate view. The company loses volume leverage, pays duplicate onboarding cost, and cannot see supplier-concentration risk.

What we find: a unified vendor master, a functional-overlap heatmap, a consolidation roadmap with modelled savings, and a supplier-risk register.

On £20M spend: a 25 to 40% smaller supplier base, 5 to 12% on renegotiated categories (£1.0 to 2.4M), plus £300 to 700K from cutting spot purchasing.

03 · Assets, hardware  ·  Technology and Automation

Paying for what no longer exists

Asset registries are unreliable: stale CMDBs, lease schedules that do not match inventory, maintenance contracts covering decommissioned kit. The waste is threefold: direct cost, opportunity cost, and the security exposure that surfaces in exit diligence.

What we find: a ghost-asset register, an unreturned-device list for departed staff, hardware rationalisation, and maintenance-contract alignment.

On £5M hardware and maintenance: ghost elimination of 8 to 15% (£400 to 750K), maintenance cleanup £150 to 350K, and £800 to 1,500 per unreturned device.

04 · Licences, software  ·  Technology and Automation

Half the seats, none of the visibility

The average mid-market company runs 40 to 60 SaaS applications and uses fewer than half. Shadow IT compounds the waste, and licence non-compliance is a hidden liability that crystallises when vendors audit usage at exit.

What we find: a licence utilisation report, an application rationalisation roadmap, a shadow IT inventory, and true-up exposure quantified before a vendor audit can.

On £2 to 4M software: unused reclamation £200 to 600K in 90 days, rationalisation £150 to 400K, and shadow IT consolidation cutting per-seat cost 20 to 35%.

Composite, on a typical mid-market PortCo: more than £500K in identified, evidence-backed annual savings across the four domains by Day 25, with zero operational disruption. At a 10x EBITDA multiple, the conservative end alone implies £5M+ of enterprise value, before the upper ranges.
All figures are illustrative for a fictitious mid-market PortCo (the spend base differs by domain, as shown) and a 10x EBITDA exit multiple, for demonstration only. Percentages are published industry averages; actuals vary by company. A pilot replaces these estimates with measured findings.
For Microsoft 365 environments

Copilot scouts,
Entra verifies

Most PE portfolio companies already hold Microsoft 365 E3 or E5, which include Copilot and Entra ID. Accelr8 uses both at zero incremental cost, collapsing discovery and licence validation from weeks to hours. No new tooling to procure.

Discovery

Copilot scouts

Surfaces contracts, order forms and agreements across SharePoint, OneDrive and email, ready for the agents to interrogate without manual export.

Identity truth

Entra verifies

The definitive record of who has access, which licences are actively consumed, which accounts are dormant, and which assets sit with departed staff.

Cost

Zero incremental cost

It runs on the M365 licences the company already pays for, read-only, with data staying inside the tenancy boundary.

Evidence, not assertions

Every finding scored,
certified and logged

Each finding carries a confidence score and a complete provenance chain, and nothing is acted on until a human certifies it. Findings live in a trust ledger that functions as a single, auditable source of truth, with an immutable log built for PE governance and exit diligence.

Principle

Read-only throughout

Agents observe and analyse in place. The platform never changes, moves or deletes anything in production.

Principle

Human-certified

Findings below a confidence threshold are routed to a human review queue; corrections feed back into the platform.

Principle

Clean offboarding

At the end of the engagement, data is transferred to the company or destroyed with certified, verifiable erasure.

Deployment

Live in 25 days,
banking by Day 90

An overlapping, iterative rollout, not a waterfall. Validation begins the moment the first connector is live, so value surfaces early.

By dayMilestone
Day 10Priority sources connected; first ghost-asset and contract-leakage registers populated.
Day 15Contract leakage register with quantified value per finding; early licence utilisation view.
Day 25More than £500K in identified annual savings across the four domains; the majority of the asset base certified.
Day 90More than 40% of identified savings banked in P&L and cash; a material improvement in CMDB accuracy.