Case Studies
How Independent Pricing Intelligence Transformed a Global Procurement Team’s Negotiation Confidence and Supply Chain Resilience
Gilbarco Veeder-Root, powered by Vontier
Gilbarco Veeder-Root, powered by Vontier
- Company
- Gilbarco Veeder-Root, Powered by Vontier
- Industry
- Mobility Systems / Industrial Electronics — Fuel dispensers, EV chargers, hydrogen dispensers, car washes, POS software
- Geography
- Global — Market leadership position across multiple countries and regions. European procurement headquarters in Italy.
- Contact
- Nicola Margani, Director, Vontier Supply Corp. EMS Category
The Challenge: The Limits of Internal Data in a Fast-Moving Market
Gilbarco Veeder-Root entered the 2021-2022 chip shortage with what appeared to be a fully instrumented procurement operation. The team maintained open-book cost transparency with their Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) partner, a well-maintained ERP, consistent OTD measurement, and deep supplier relationships built over many years. To all internal indicators, the supply chain was under control.
When the chip crisis hit, those signals proved insufficient — not because they were inaccurate, but because they were retrospective. Internal data, by design, captures what has already happened. It cannot see what is forming in the supply base until a supplier communicates it. And suppliers communicate disruptions after they are already underway.
The chip crisis was too fast to be captured by our internal data. If the change is slow, maybe you can start to keep signal even with your internal data. But when the situation is fast — and in the chip crisis it was really fast — your internal data is not helping you.
The cost of reacting too late
The operational consequences were severe. To maintain production continuity, Gilbarco had to execute high-cost broker buys under extreme time pressure. The team faced significant budget overruns, compounding complexity, and unsustainable organizational stress. Most critically, one product line reached an end-of-life event on a core CPU component. A product redesign that would normally require nine to twelve months had to be executed in three months to keep the product line alive.
The team had not failed to prepare by normal industry standards. They had prepared thoroughly — by the standards of a slower-moving world. The chip crisis established that those standards were no longer adequate.
The Turning Point: Recognizing the Structural Gap
Coming out of the chip crisis, Gilbarco Veeder-Root’s procurement leadership undertook a systematic reassessment. The team identified two specific organizational blind spots: first, an over-concentration on the EMS relationship as the primary — and effectively only — source of supply intelligence; and second, the absence of independent pricing data to validate or contextualize what EMS partners were communicating.
Three structural changes were made. The first was organizational: Gilbarco created a dedicated market intelligence role, specifically recognizing that day-to-day buyers absorbed by operational demand forecasting and purchase order management had no bandwidth to conduct proactive market intelligence work. The second was expanding direct engagement up the supply chain — building direct relationships with distributors and component manufacturers in parallel with EMS relationships, rather than delegating that coverage entirely to the EMS.
These changes meaningfully improved their market awareness. But a pricing visibility gap remained. Even with expanded relationships, Gilbarco’s pricing reference point was still anchored to what the EMS and distribution channel communicated — not an independent market view.
The decision to deploy Lytica was the third structural change: introducing a pricing and risk intelligence platform that provided independent benchmarking data, decoupled from any supplier or channel relationship. The value proposition was not replacing the EMS data — it was having an independent reference point to contextualize it.
The Lytica Impact: Intelligence That Changed the Negotiation Dynamic
The immediate and most visible change was in negotiation posture. Where procurement discussions had previously been reactive — anchored to supplier-provided pricing, focused on availability rather than cost optimization — Gilbarco’s sourcing team could now enter negotiations with an independent view of where market pricing stood.
The tone of the negotiation with suppliers completely changed. Before, it was more emotional — discussing what is the cost, what is the lead time for my parts. Having all this information on our hands, it became a much more professional discussion with our EMS. We sit on the same side of the table, sharing our experience, searching for the best opportunity to reduce cost.
A shared market view. New savings opportunities.
The shift was qualitative as much as quantitative. With independent benchmarking data on the table, the EMS relationship moved from a transactional information asymmetry to a genuinely collaborative one — both parties working from the same market context toward shared cost optimization.
Nicola also highlighted an unexpected return on investment in a category that is often deprioritized: passives. Using independent benchmarking data rather than EMS-provided pricing, Gilbarco achieved what he described as ‘outstanding’ savings on passive components — a category widely assumed to be already optimized.
Just to give you a very simple example — the results we were able to achieve even on simple components like passives using benchmark and price data independent from EMS was incredible. You usually feel passives are something legacy you don’t take care about so much. The results were outstanding.
Acting before internal signals changed
The intelligence model also enabled a more proactive response to the DDR memory market shift beginning in late 2025. Where the chip crisis caught Gilbarco unprepared, the memory crisis was anticipated. In Q4 2025 — when OTD still showed 98% and formal price communication from suppliers had not yet arrived — Lytica market intelligence indicated that memory manufacturers were shifting capacity to AI applications. Gilbarco acted early, securing broker buys and safety stock at prices that would prove, by early 2026, to be roughly half the market rate.
ROI materialized quickly. In Nicola’s assessment, the returns arrived within months — not quarters — once the team was trained on the platform and had assembled sufficient market context alongside the pricing data.
From reactive crisis management to proactive market intelligence
Gilbarco Veeder-Root moved from reactive crisis management to proactive market intelligence — reducing negotiation risk, capturing meaningful cost reductions in commodity categories previously considered optimized, and building the organizational capability to anticipate supply disruptions before they appear in internal data systems.
About Lytica
Lytica is the Global Standard for Electronic Sourcing. As the leader in AI-driven electronic component intelligence, Lytica empowers enterprise procurement teams to balance cost, risk, and time to market with the world’s only Agentic Sourcing Intelligence (ASI). While traditional tools rely on static web-scraping or “list prices,” our SupplyLens™ Pro platform gives procurement teams the actual market-paid clarity needed to command negotiations, eliminate hidden supply risks, and drive margin expansion upstream. For the first time, global OEMs and EMS providers are moving out of the dark. By turning billions of data points into actionable leverage, Lytica transforms procurement from a reactive cost center into a high-cadence strategic advantage. To learn more about how Lytica is changing the face of electronic sourcing, visit Lytica.com.