Background
A Supply Chain Under Pressure
Turkey is the world's second-largest white goods production hub after China, accounting for approximately 7% of global appliance output — around 27 million units annually, with more than 75% destined for export markets across Europe and MENA. A dense ecosystem of OEMs, tier-one suppliers, and specialist manufacturers serves major brands across the world.
Yet in recent years, that ecosystem has faced mounting pressure. Turkey has experienced severe hyperinflation, with consumer price inflation peaking at 85.4% in October 2022 — the highest rate in over two decades — before settling at an annual average of 32% in 2026. For businesses operating in Turkish lira while purchasing materials priced against global commodity markets, the effect has been compounding and relentless.
The downstream impact on supply chain costs was severe. Corrugated and paper-based packaging prices surged globally in 2021–2022, with containerboard prices in Europe nearly doubling before a partial correction in 2023 — though for Turkish buyers, lira depreciation meant the effective cost burden remained elevated even as dollar-denominated commodity prices eased.
For small to mid-sized suppliers in Turkey's appliance supply chain, the challenge was acute. These companies were not large enough to command preferential pricing, yet their cost exposure was just as real as that of the major OEMs they served. Procurement bandwidth was stretched thin managing direct input cost pressures, and indirect categories — packaging, consumables, logistics — had gone without the scrutiny they warranted. In a period of cost inflation, that gap had become expensive.
Approach
A New Approach to a Familiar Problem
In this environment, Eluvium engaged a group of Turkish suppliers and manufacturers to address their indirect procurement categories. The entry point was corrugated cardboard packaging — a category that cuts across virtually every company in the sector, yet is rarely sourced with the rigour applied to direct materials.
The challenge was structural as much as commercial. These buyers were purchasing independently, with no visibility into what their peers were spending, no sense of what competitive market pricing looked like, and no leverage to negotiate meaningfully with suppliers.
Eluvium's proposition was straightforward in principle— but only achievable at this speed and scale because of the platform behind it. Rather than deploying a consulting team to manually coordinate spend data, build RFQs, and manage negotiations across eight separate buyers, Eluvium's AI handled the coordination layer entirely: normalising specifications, consolidating demand, and running a structured sourcing event in the time a traditional process would still be in setup. Each buyer benefited from the scale they could not achieve individually — without the cost or timeline of a bespoke consulting engagement.
- Weeks of setup before a single RFQ reaches a supplier
- Spend data normalised manually, buyer by buyer
- Suppliers negotiated sequentially — slow and inconsistent
- Restricted to existing supplier relationships
- Bespoke consulting fees on top of every engagement
- Operational in hours — end-to-end in two weeks
- AI normalises spend across all eight buyers simultaneously
- 30+ suppliers engaged and negotiated in parallel
- Full supplier market mapped beyond incumbents
- No consulting overhead — AI handles the coordination layer
“Packaging costs had drifted up year after year, but we couldn't find the bandwidth to source for new suppliers. Eluvium's value proposition was straightforward and low-risk. We uploaded our spend data, and within ten days we had supplier quotes back without our team lifting a finger. We're on track to save 31% on packaging costs.”
Process
Six Steps, Two Weeks — Powered by AI
The process Eluvium ran was designed to solve a specific problem: how do you run a credible, competitive sourcing event for a group of buyers who do not know each other, using a supplier market that may not know those buyers exist?
The answer was a structured approach, executed through Eluvium's AI-driven procurement platform.
Each participating company submitted their spend data and product specifications to the platform. Eluvium's AI standardised inputs and cross-checked specifications across all eight buyers simultaneously — a normalisation task that would take a consulting team weeks, compressed into hours — consolidating comparable specifications into unified demand packages and transforming individually negligible volumes into a single, credible demand signal.
Eluvium's AI generated RFQ packages for each consolidated category — structured, specification-consistent, and ready to go to market within hours of data ingestion. A traditional multi-buyer RFQ process coordinated manually would require weeks of drafting and alignment before a single document reached a supplier. Properly-scoped briefs meant suppliers could quote accurately and competitively from the outset, without clarification cycles that erode time and dilute competitive tension.
Eluvium's AI mapped the full supplier market — identifying and approaching both the buyers' incumbent suppliers and alternative suppliers not previously in scope, without the manual research hours a consulting firm would require to build the same picture. In a category as broad as corrugated cardboard, market depth matters: the savings opportunity lies not only in renegotiating with existing partners, but in surfacing qualified suppliers who had never had visibility of this demand. Engaging 30+ suppliers across a two-week window is not operationally feasible without automation.
Quotes were collected and negotiated by Eluvium's AI — across 30+ suppliers simultaneously and with consistent discipline — a scale of parallel negotiation that would otherwise require either a large negotiating team, introducing inconsistency across negotiators, or weeks of sequential effort from a smaller one.
Eluvium's AI evaluated all responses across specifications, price, and payment terms — and presented the best-value options to buyers in a structured, comparable format. Price alone does not determine value; payment terms carry real cash flow implications for SMEs operating under inflationary conditions, and specification compliance is non-negotiable.
Buyers were then connected directly with shortlisted suppliers for sampling and final contract discussions. The platform handed off to human relationships at the moment they matter most — when buyers needed to verify quality, test materials, and build the commercial confidence required before committing to a new supplier.
Outcome
Results: 29% in Measurable Savings
The end-to-end process — from spend data submission to shortlisted suppliers — completed in two weeks. Each step in that cycle would represent a multi-week workstream in a traditional consulting engagement. By compressing the full cycle, Eluvium delivered 29% savings on corrugated cardboard packaging costs with minimal disruption to the procurement teams involved.
The outcome was not simply a better price. Participating buyers gained access to a wider supplier base, with new entrants bringing both competitive pricing and a fresh source of supply security.
In a market where scale has historically belonged to the largest players, Eluvium demonstrated that collective action — structured correctly — can redistribute that advantage. Packaging, for these companies, had long been simply a cost of doing business. It is now a category under active management.
“As a smaller buyer, we never had the volume to negotiate meaningfully — packaging was just a cost we absorbed. Eluvium gave us access to pricing we couldn't have reached alone. We're now looking at our other indirect procurement categories to see where else this approach could work for us.”
Find Out How Eluvium Can Uncover Savings for Your Business
Corrugated packaging was the starting point — Eluvium is already working with the same group across freight, industrial consumables, and other indirect categories. If your business is facing cost pressure in indirect spend, get in touch to learn what collective purchasing power could mean for your margins.
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