Archive for September, 2018

What is a Salesperson’s Role Part II of II

Wednesday, September 19th, 2018

 

Today’s post is by Alex Borbely, Director of Sales at SafeSourcing Inc

In yesterday’s Part I of this post, I summarized by stating that SafeSourcing’s flexible service offerings and suite of e-procurement tools deliver savings that can be referenced that are greater than 10 times the cost of the service is one thing, proving it is even easier when looking at historical category savings of retail buyers that have utilized the SafeSourcing tools.  During my second week back at SafeSourcing I attended two pilot events for a smaller size convenience store chain.  The pilot agreement contained two reverse auctions for two categories.  Bottom line is that the saving realized on both events were over 20 times savings vs event costs.  An immediate ROI is very evident to the retailer.  Immediate discussions then went in the direction of what other purchases are being done within the organization that similar savings could be realized.  It was very easy to assemble a quick list for discussion purposes.  The tool used in this example is a reverse auction using SafeSourcing for new contract purchases, spot buys, replenishment, aggregation, and collaboration with other buying organizations, SAVING you the buyer 30% to 40% even from vendors that you currently buy from today.  One of the most important pieces of this offering is the SafeSourcing Supplier Database which has over 427,000 global suppliers.  It is easy to use and, utilizing SafeSourcing’s Templates Library, the procurement buyer can reduce time and effort for searching for new sourcing initiatives.

Once the no risk pilot is completed, and a retailer can see the immediate savings that SafeSourcing will bring to their organization, SafeSourcing’s Spend Analysis is offered to assist the retailer in formulating the types of events where SafeSourcing reverse auctions will be utilized.  It is important to remember that the buying event can include up to 20 line items in each event and SafeSourcing even offers a provision in the agreement to protect the retailer in smaller “buys” so that the cost of the event is tolerable for smaller volume purchases, such as toner cartridges for office and in-store printers or light bulbs for store fixtures.  The results are phenomenal with a ROI second to none with a very quick set up time all provided by a team of professionals that offer a full service offering.

In closing, it is great to be back at SafeSourcing and visiting retailers with such a feature rich offering that provides a low cost of usage and an instant return on investment.  I look forward to meeting many retailers representing this exciting full service offering and assisting procurement professionals with striving to bring additional dollars to their bottom line.

For more information on SafeSourcing, or on our Risk Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service representative. We have an entire team ready to assist you today.

 

 

What is a Salesperson’s Role Part I of II

Tuesday, September 18th, 2018

 

Today’s post is by Alex Borbely, Director of Sales at SafeSourcing Inc.

As a 30 year sales veteran, I am happy to be back with SafeSourcing for the second time in my career.  A salesperson’s role in any organization is to sell the company’s products and support the clients.  Challenge number one in selling is always to find the ROI in the product you are representing and being able to demonstrate that ROI to the buyer in a timely manner where investment doesn’t exceed return.  I have represented many offerings both SW and HW during my career and that ROI is sometimes not an easy task to find or to explain to a buyer.  Many times the ROI is spread over a 12 to 18 month period or longer with dribs and drabs coming in monthly or even annually. I am pleased to have rejoined SafeSourcing and representing a robust procurement full service offering.  The ROI is a certainty apparent to the prospect and easily able to demonstrate to a prospect that is looking for a procurement solution with an end goal of reducing cost of goods and services.  Who wouldn’t be interested in a 10X ROI?  That is what the SafeSourcing offering will do.  The full service team will help product buyers save considerably on costs by providing tools that enhance the ability to do business in a better, safer, smarter, more streamlined and cost effective way.  SafeSourcing Services Team is one of the best in the industry at complimenting existing procurement teams to help structure and develop projects in less time for better results.  The flexible service offerings and suite of e-procurement tools deliver savings that can be referenced that are greater than 10 times the cost of the service.

In review until tomorrows Part II, it is great to be back at SafeSourcing and visiting retailers with such a feature rich offering that provides a low cost of usage and an instant return on investment.  I look forward to meeting many retailers representing this exciting full service offering and assisting procurement professionals with striving to bring additional dollars to their bottom line.

For more information on SafeSourcing, or on our Risk Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service representative. We have an entire team ready to assist you today.

 

 

Understanding the Technology of Traceability!

Friday, September 14th, 2018

 

Today?s post is?from our?SafeSourcing?Archives

GS1, the global standards body, the FDA, and the USDA are just a few of the organizations that are striving to increase the safety of the food we eat with new standards, processes and regulations.? With recent scares in several food items in the past few years it is no wonder that people are becoming extremely focused? on how to trace our food back to its original source.? In today?s blog we will look at some of the technologies that are helping with this process.

Enterprise Software ? There are many enterprise systems out there for warehouse management and enterprise resource management that can maintain the necessary data needed to meet traceability and recall requirements but the key to these programs working for your business is whether or not they have the additional features necessary to track category/industry specific details such as those faced by seafood and meat retailers, wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers.? Companies such as JustFoodERP specialize in tracking meat and seafood by-products during the course of their life, tracking not only down to individual cases, but also providing capabilities such as the Recipe Management module to help track the by-products of the meat and seafood into other products they sell.? By managing catch-weights with a serial number tracking system, solutions like these can ensure best practices for traceability throughout their organization.

RFID ? Radio Frequency Identification is not a new technology but continued development of the technology for use in traceability improves daily.? Like a barcode it can contain a unique identifier that will trace the product back to its source.? Unlike a barcode, RFID tags can be secured to be difficult to tamper with or damage, they can be placed in packaging as opposed to outside the packaging like barcodes that must be able to be seen, and unlike barcodes they can be written to and updated as the product travels through the supply chain.? With one scan an RFID tag can provide the appropriate user pages worth of information without having to be connected to an enterprise solution which can be critical when a recall is being tracked.

DNA Sampling ? During the major meat recalls in the early 2000?s, DNA sampling began to take shape and developed as an alternative to typical tracing methods at that time.? With a global database of animal DNA it is possible to trace every product and byproduct back the farm or processing point of origin.? Taking DNA samples from the each carcass at the farm or packaging plant, a profile is created and stored in the database.? At any point a new sample can be taken to verify the contents and origin of the meet.? The process is virtually tamper-proof and would eliminate costly barcodes and documents and would also allow retailers and distributors to know exactly which shipments to recall, saving millions of dollars.

For more information about how we can assist you in looking into these technologies for your business, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.? We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

We look forward to your comments.

When is it important for National companies to invite regional providers to bid on their business?

Thursday, September 13th, 2018

 

Todays post is from our SafeSourcing Inc Archives

Every day thousands of National companies with offices all over the country are in various stages of determining what type of product to purchase for their company and from whom they are buying it from.

Part of this decision making process involves deciding on whether they are going to deal only with other National companies or whether they will include regional companies as well.  Today we will be looking at some of the reasons why inviting regional companies to compete for you business is a good idea.

Multi-Award for Geography – While there are frequently several National companies that can handle the needs of a large National customer, there are certain services and products that can be best serviced with companies who specialize in certain regions of the country.  In these cases it adds great value when the companies that know those geographical regions the best are included in the mix of those competing directly for that portion of your company’s business.

Secondary Supplier – Many companies in today’s market have introduced Board-Level directives requiring a level of division of the company’s business so that no one vendor has the entire share for any one product or service; especially those services critical to the mission of the company.  There are different trains of thought on the effectiveness of this philosophy, but where it applies, introducing regional players, especially ones that can handle a large portion of your spend, can help meet those requirements and provide competitive savings in certain products backing up your primary supplier.

Expanding the selection pool – Often there will be products or services that by focusing only on National suppliers, will limit the field from which you have to choose.  Expanding the field of vision from which to choose to include regional players provides you, as the customer, an opportunity to see more of what is out there and allow for a more competitive landscape from which to choose.  These companies may not always be selected but in following this approach they have an opportunity for access into an account they may never had had before while providing you with a strong field from which to choose from.

These are just a few of the reasons why expanding the pool of companies allowed to win your company’s business to include regional vendors can be a good idea for you.  For more reasons or for assistance in finding regional companies who can compete for your business, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative. 

We look forward to your comments.

Understanding the Synergy of Culture and Procurement

Wednesday, September 12th, 2018

 

Today’s post is from our SafeSourcing. Archives

The follow-up question to the one above could be, “Do you even KNOW what your company’s culture is versus what they intended for it to be?”

I recently attended a local ISM meeting where the guest speakers from VAP Packaging did a terrific job (with a number of their team members) explaining the importance of culture not only within their organization but for other organizations as well.   The culture they have developed has empowered their entire team with the confidence to think outside the box and a system or rewards when they do so effectively.  It was impressive.  For a long time, the culture of a company and how that company handles its supply chain have not always been on the same page.  Unity and Teamwork are preached to operations while procurement is still told to SAVE MONEY and CUT COSTS.

Opportunity not just Order Taking – As procurement professionals we are tasked with assisting the business to run more smoothly, to help save money and to help foster business partnerships that will grow the company.   In many companies this translates to “Rick, I need a million widgets.  Go get me some quotes and samples of the best ones out there.  After we decide what we want you can beat them up on price and write up the contract.”   While this does provide some value to the organization by freeing operations time to do what it needs to do, it does not account for the fact that maybe “Rick” could have presented 2 new options to the business that switch to “dongles” at half the cost, half the volume and can improve operational efficiency by 25%.   Not all companies will embrace outside the box thinking from its procurement team so understanding where the current culture stands is an important part of improving that.

Value of cost reduction – There are so many times people get enamored by the numbers.  They hear about a solution or product that has an ROI of 5x in 6 months or that can generate $500,000 in savings, and they instantly seek for ways to implement that service or bring that product into use.  What can be ignored in the process, is the fact that by introducing this new product that is going to save $500k to operations, internal procedures and personnel must now change what they are doing, resulting in a drop in efficiency of 40%, costing the company $1M over 9 months.  There can be a cost of change to achieve savings and understanding the pressure points with the organization is critical to weighing the value of a new change.

Understand the Relationships – Many professionals will see this point and think “See, don’t mess around with the vendor relationships I have spent years developing.”  This is not saying that.  The point being made here is to understand completely what relationships are currently in place so that they can be reviewed for improvement. Partnerships can be good.  They can provide security and assistance in emergencies and they can help strengthen companies when the fit is right.  Partnerships are not always good when they are defined by “I have been doing business with Jim for 10 years and he has never let me down.  I am sure he is giving me the best prices he can give me.  He even stops by once a month to take me to lunch where I hardly see other vendors.”  These types of relationships have the tendency to cover years of price increases and terms that have benefitted only the vendor.  Understand the relationships in place so that facts and research can be done to either challenge or support the value they bring to the organization.

At SafeSourcing we understand the value of understanding your company culture and have been doing it for our customers to help them effectively structure projects for years.  For more information on how SafeSourcing can assist you or on our “Risk Free” trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.  We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

We look forward to your comments.

Planning for Your Next Procurement Hire

Friday, September 7th, 2018

 

Today’s post is from our SafeSourcing Archives.

As the landscape of the corporate world continues to change to adapt to changes in the economy, procurement departments are being asked to expand their areas of support throughout the organization.  This expansion will require that procurement staffs begin to look for specialized expertise to augment their current staff whether in the form of temporary, permanent or 3rd party help.

In today’s blog will be look at three areas of expertise that will be important to procurement staffs in the future.

IT – Historically, most companies have let their IT department’s research and negotiate their own hardware and software deals due to the level of expertise needed to understand the company requirements.  This process is beginning to shift as companies are looking to compress the pricing they receive after the RFP process has been narrowed down and the short list of vendors has been selected.  To do this requires staff or a 3rd party vendor who can help facilitate this process, speaking with the vendors at a technical level everyone understands.

Hired Services– Hired services are can be complex categories to understand within an organization and the larger the company the more complex the process to procure these services can be.  Many teams are looking for support help from the administrative and Human Resources departments to understand the scope and SOWs the company needs as well as looking to 3rd party vendors such as Managed Service Providers to help them with this process.

Transportation/Logistics – Very few spends within a large organization are as complex and as mission critical as the freight lanes they use.  Late product is unacceptable and can result in customers changing to the competition.  While they critical to the business they can also be very complex as the fuel prices fluctuate and as regulations, especially of the international variety, seem to change constantly.  Looking for new permanent or temporary staff that have a background in logistics can go a long way to helping your company put programs in place that are flexible enough to adjust with the market but protect you enough to budget the spend.
For assistance in filling some of these areas of expertise in your organization, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.

We look forward to your comments.

Selective Exposure

Thursday, September 6th, 2018

 

 

Today’s post is our SafeSourcing Archives

Mark Zuckerberg once famously said “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa”. Along those same lines, Eric Schmidt of Google fame proclaimed “The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them”. Often times statements like these disquiet our fears of artificial intelligence, or of Google powered robots taking over the world. But I think there’s a much bigger, and more immediate cost to what is being described above.

Have you ever noticed how many of the news feeds, search results, and advertisements that you don’t have a choice in seeing are often customized to your interests? What kind of long term effects do you think this will have on a society, especially one that is only getting more and more embedded into online networks of all types? Some believe it will necessarily lead to us only seeing the information we agree with, and that can be a dangerous thing.

This is why Eli Pariser, executive director of moveon.org, believes that opinions are becoming both more polarized, and more narrow minded. One way this problem seems to be manifesting itself is through the increasing polarization of opinions in topics ranging from global warming, gun control, ISIS, and vaccines. The claims of both sides of any argument seem to get more extreme and certain of their views, and rarely ever less. This is because the algorithms that review our history and populate our search results, also tailor our information feeds to what we want to see. But how then will we learn things we need to know, without being limited to the things we want to know?

Right now, the options are limited. All of your Facebook and Google results go through algorithms that customize their outputs to your activity. Google gives some tips for how to prevent that in PC browser searches by deactivating your history[1], but that option is not available for mobile browsing. Don’t forget, these companies are advertising revenue based, so they’re incentivized right off the bat to give you output that will sell ad space, which is more effective with personalized marketing. In this case, although there doesn’t seem to be a black and white answer, age old advice seems to be the most useful: Never stop learning, listen to opinions different than yours, be humble, and never assume you are right without considering the alternatives.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can assist your team with this process or on our “Risk Free” trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.  We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

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[1] “Search and browse privately – the Google Help Center.” 2014. 14 Dec. 2015 <https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/4540094?hl=en>

Coca-Cola is Getting Boozy

Wednesday, September 5th, 2018

 

 

Today’s post is by Gayl Southard, Administrative Consultant at SafeSourcing.

Coca-Cola took its first fly at a lemon-flavored alcoholic drink that went to market in Fukuoka, Japan at the end of May 2018. Canned drinks known as chuhai have been popular in Japan for sometime.  Often they are made with distilled grain-based alcohol, known as shochu, along with carbonated water and fruit juice.  This new lemon-flavored alcoholic beverage is called Lemon-Do.  The beverage is sold in 3%, 5%, and 7% alcohol, including a salty lemon version and another flavored with honey and lemon; however, it contains no Coke!  Currently, Coca-Cola is a big competitor of non-alcoholic drinks in Japan.  To date, Suntory Holdings, Ltd., Kirin Holdings Co. and Asashi Group Holdings products dominate the convenience-store and supermarket shelves.

With a population of 13 million, the southern island of Kyushu will allow Coca-Cola to see how this test market of Japanese-style booze will be received and, hopefully, give it insight into how to apply their knowledge in other countries. “Despite falling demand overall for alcoholic drinks in Japan owing to the country’s shrinking population, demand for canned booze has been growing, in part because it is taxed less than beer and is cheaper.”  The product is well received by both men and women.  Coca-Cola wants to appeal to women with a low-alcoholic product.

For more information on SafeSourcing, or on our Risk Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service representative. We have an entire team ready to assist you.

References————————————————

Suryatapa Bhattacharya, WSJ, 5/29/2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to negotiate without hurting your supplier relationships

Tuesday, September 4th, 2018

 

Today’s post is from our SafeSourcing Archives

When negotiating a sale with a vendor, the wrong process can quickly change the tone of communication from a friendly sales meeting to that of a confrontation. With large accounts at stake and communication tools that can lose the intended meaning of the speaker, misunderstanding can easily breed offence. The process doesn’t have to devolve into a foray that sours business relationships however. The health of your business will require healthy, win-win, long-term relationships with your suppliers, so let’s consider a few rules for promoting a healthy negotiation outcome:

Clear away assumptions

The only assumption you should start with is that you will discover unknown variables during the procurement process. This is why it will be crucial to allow for questions, feedback, involvement from SME’s and stakeholders, as well as flexibility for the process to be iterative. Your team may publish a set of specifications, then find that there were options in the market they weren’t even aware of from the vendor community. Assuming you know all there is to know about a category could force you into a purchase that is sacrificing value without considering other opportunities identified in the process, as well as alienate suppliers who may be trying to help you help yourself.

Think win-win

You and your suppliers know each other’s business: How can you help each other do business better? Things like “If we changed shipping schedules we could save our vendor a ton of money. And if the vendor sent us PO’s through our EDI system we’d save a lot of time”. The give and take of negotiation doesn’t have to be win/lose. Find the variables that make sense for both parties and adds value to the full project, not just the invoice.

Have a clearly defined process

Leveraging competing quotes to drive savings can be exhausting when done linearly. The back and forth over remote location can be extremely time consuming, and the “negotiation room” tactic leaves suppliers feeling short-changed. This is why e-sourcing web-tools are designed to consolidate complexity through clearly defined mechanisms. Bids are collected with a simple and immediate indication of low quote status. Negotiation is technical, not personal, parameters such as top threshold of quote are identified from the outset, and the timeline and specifications are all in one place.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can assist your team this process or on our “Risk Free” trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.  We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

We look forward to your comments.