A global consumer-goods manufacturer recovered overcharges on its SAP Fieldglass services-procurement spend, capped forward usage at a contracted ceiling, and rebuilt the worker-classification taxonomy underlying the contract.
Three results from a fourteen-week services-procurement compliance engagement. Reference call available under NDA.
The client is a global consumer-packaged-goods manufacturer with brands sold in forty-one markets. SAP Fieldglass had been deployed five years earlier as the system of record for contingent-workforce procurement — statement-of-work spend, independent contractors, and managed-service-provider engagements — with a worker population fluctuating between sixteen and twenty thousand at any point in time.
The Fieldglass commercial model included a transaction-fee component charged against spend flowing through the platform, a per-engagement fee for managed-service engagements, and a series of premium-module charges for analytics and worker-onboarding workflows. The contract had been renewed twice without re-baselining the worker classification or the module entitlements.
The trigger for our engagement was a finance variance review that flagged Fieldglass platform fees running approximately twenty-four per cent above forecast for the prior two fiscal years. The procurement leadership engaged us to validate the fee model, audit the classification of spend running through the platform, and negotiate the recovery and forward cap.
We obtained the full transaction log from Fieldglass covering twenty-four months and reconciled every chargeable event back to the contract definitions. Three categories of issue accounted for the overage: spend that had been classified as in-scope but was contractually carved out, premium-module charges for modules the client was not actively using, and a managed-service-provider engagement count that included expired and dormant engagements.
Approximately fourteen per cent of the chargeable spend was for engagements covered by a separately negotiated master services agreement with a different Fieldglass commercial structure. The Fieldglass billing engine had defaulted these to standard transaction fees. The contract carve-out had been documented in a side letter that was not loaded into the billing configuration.
We mapped every engagement back to its governing agreement, rebuilt the classification taxonomy, and presented Fieldglass with a corrected fee model. Fieldglass agreed the position after a six-week review cycle, with one carve-out category remaining in dispute but excluded from the recovery total.
The settlement returned two point one million dollars in credits, applied against forward platform fees. The dormant managed-service engagements were closed in the system, removing roughly three per cent of the recurring engagement count from the chargeable base.
The amendment introduced a forward cap on platform fees at twenty-one per cent below the prior twelve-month run-rate, with a stair-step adjustment mechanism tied to actual contingent-worker volume. The carve-out side letter was incorporated into the master agreement and reflected in the billing configuration. The premium-module charges were converted to a per-active-user basis with an automatic deactivation rule for modules not used for ninety consecutive days.
The client’s procurement team retained a quarterly reconciliation routine using the rebuilt classification taxonomy, with a defined escalation path to a buyer-side review committee for any variance above five per cent.
The recovery was significant, but the forward cap and the classification rebuild are what changed our position permanently. We are not relying on goodwill any more.
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