$400,000
Healthcare and benefits, annually
8 → 1
Service vendors
Bars are drawn against a 0–100% scale, so the length is the reduction itself rather than a comparison between engagements. Every figure here is stated in the text above.
The situation
A manufacturer approaching its hundredth year, headquartered in the Southeast with offices in several states and locations overseas, was divesting its manufacturing operations and rebuilding around a manufacturing-representative model. That meant a series of layoffs, and a remaining population of about a hundred and five full-time employees who would run the new business.
The board wanted three things that pull against each other: lower operating cost, a benefits package strong enough to attract the people the new structure needed, and predictable budgeting. On top of that, the open-market health renewal had just arrived at an increase of 26.55%, and two business units were running on different benefit contributions with no single set of HR policies across them. There was no HRIS capable of tracking any of it.
What we did
We ran an analysis and selection process and put forward the three strongest PEO options for this specific problem. Three, not eight: a shortlist that a management team in the middle of a restructuring can actually evaluate is worth more than a comprehensive one they cannot.
The outcome
The selected PEO reduced healthcare and benefits costs by almost $400,000 annually, and made future medical renewal budgeting materially more predictable — which, in a restructuring, was close to as valuable as the saving itself. Eight separate service vendors were consolidated into one.
The platform brought capabilities the company had been planning to buy separately: applicant tracking, performance management and expense management, in one system rather than three. Reporting and data management improved with it. Several benefit options came at no cost to the company or its employees, and the resulting program measurably improved the firm’s ability to hire into the new structure. One set of HR and benefit policies now covers the whole organization.
What this one illustrates
A 26.55% renewal is the kind of number that makes a company act, and acting under that pressure usually means solving for the renewal alone. The larger result here came from everything adjacent to it — vendor consolidation, a platform that replaced three planned purchases, policy alignment across two business units that had drifted apart. The renewal was the reason the conversation started. It was not the reason the outcome was worth having.
If this resembles your situation
Count your vendors before you shop your renewal. If payroll, time, benefits administration, retirement, compliance and HRIS are six relationships with six contracts and six renewal dates, the renewal in front of you is one of several conversations you are about to have, and treating it in isolation is how firms end up optimising the smallest of them.
Published outcomes follow BRG’s confidentiality standard: industry category and outcome only. Fuller detail is shared in the live discussion. Related practice: PEO / ASO Advisory.
