Finding new sources of supply has always been an issue. It may even be more important if your current suppliers can not provide what you need because they were forced to down size during the recent economic tragedy.
In the Monday May 10th issue of USA TODAY the Money Section carried an article titled “Suppliers can?t meet demand” by Paul Davidson. The article went on to discuss that the economic rebound has been so robust that manufacturers are struggling so much with demand that it is causing huge bottlenecks in the supply chain. The article also went on to discuss that companies are reluctant to hire to meet the demand because they are not totally convinced that the current rebound will last.
The retail supply chain is something that this author has posted on dozens of times from the importance of a robust retail supply chain to how to manage your relationships with current and new sources of supply. A significant part of that is to have secondary and tertiary sources of supply that you can rely upon. By example, during the most recent H1N1 flu outbreak, Safesourcing was able to provide multiple sources of surgical mask suppliers to one of our customers that had not been able to find them elsewhere for sales in their stores. They did not know of these suppliers. They are also a very large company. Although this particular issue was caused by panic buying, it is still a supply and demand problem and correlates very well to the USA TODAY article. The message here is, don?t wait until a time of panic or increased prosperity to work and plan for spikes in the supply chain that may cause your customers pain.
Following are five Safesourcing blog posts from 2008 that should provide some good base reading on this subject.
1.?Is critical thinking in supplier selection a key to quality auctions? You bet!
2.?Supplier Open Communication. A key to high quality e-procurement events.
3.?Supplier-selection-this-may-be-the-most-important-decision-you-make
4.?What is retail supply base management?
5.?What is the benefit of a large retail supplier database and how do companies use the data to support growing their spend with reverse auctions?
The SafeSourceIt? Retail Supplier Database contains over 380,000 vetted suppliers.
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