SafeSourcing is “OAD” Compliant!

February 13th, 2013

And, if your sourcing partner is not, your results will not be as good as ours!

Today’s post is by Ron Southard CEO of Safesourcing.

A friend and customer that has been a CFO of a fortune 100 company and now owns his own business asked me the other day why our results are so much better than other sourcing companies. For the record, he has used and been exposed to many of these companies during his career. In fact his company’s primary focus today with his customers is focused on strategic cost initiatives.  As such we get to work together quite frequently.

My simple answer was that SafeSourcing is OAD Compliant! As you might imagine, I got that HUH look. I went on to explain that we have an Obsessive Attention to Detail or “OAD”. He simply said, can you give me an example? I went on to discuss how a company might source a service like temporary labor in the administrative space across multiple geographies and multiple job descriptions. We discussed the makeup of the job descriptions and the pay rates associated with those roles. By example I explained that most companies providing these types of services wanted to provide you an hourly base rate with uplifts for overtime, holiday and other related criteria. Further, I explained that the structure our event focused on an expanded list of job requirements so that our customer would not be overcharged as example for administrative support provided by an executive assistant when an administrative assistant was all that was called for. We further broke the rates down by geography, national upcharge, and unemployment tax and workers compensation by state. Most people are not aware that workers compensation rates are different by employer by sate based on their individual company ratings. I went on to say, another quick example might be someone wanting to source heavy duty pallet racking based on the current price of steel (Hint! Think Metal Indices) while overlooking transportation cost opportunities (fuel) as well as the services required (unloading) to deploy the end product across time and geography (local distributer).

Once my friend got the gist of what we were talking about, he asked me how we continue to insure that all SafeSourcing associates function in this way. The answer was simple. We demand it. Every category that we source goes through a thorough strategy development phase where our customer and our Procurement Center of Expertise associates educate each other. We use an internal process call Question AZ. That has nothing to do with the state of Arizona where I live; it simply means that we assemble a list of questions beginning with the letter A and keep adding questions through the letter Z until there are no more questions. Simple but affective We reinforce this internally with competitions on research, adding data to our WIKI and asking every associate to write a monthly blog on a category they are working on. All of this information is shared with the entire team regularly in debrief sessions. We always think through traditional sourcing methodologies, but leave room for thinking outside of the box. Just because someone has never run a category in a certain way does not mean it cannot be done that way.

My friend’s response was WOW! and last year he ran over 300 e-RFX events with us

The simple conclusion to the above is that you can have more advanced tools, more experienced people but if you are not OAD compliant you will never drive the same results that we do.

If you’d like to learn more about the SafeSourcing 6 step process that combines three distinct sourcing strategies into one event, please contact us.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

If you thought this page is useful to your friend, use this form to send.
Friend Email
Enter your message