Category Discovery is a critical step in building your e-negotiation strategy?

August 12th, 2020

Many e-negotiation programs fail because their data is not clean or well organized in advance of the execution stage.

 

Todays post is by  Ron Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc.

Category discovery is the basis of any quality implementation of an e-negotiation strategy. It is essential that this process be supported by the company’s executive management because they hold the key to unlocking access to data sources across the enterprise. This process will include working with all category managers, buyers, other procurement knowledge workers and anyone that participates in sourcing to uncover what you don’t know in support of your Requests for Information (RFI), Proposals (RFP) and Quotations (RFQ).

The first step in this process is the understanding of where the data is hiding and in most companies large and small it is. Here’s a list to get you started. Data discovery generally comes from two sources; Internal and external.

Examples of Internal and External Data Sources

1. SLRP
2. Budgets
3. General Ledger
4. Detailed P&L
5. Purchase Orders
6. Contracts
7. Detailed Vendor Listing
8. Product List by Vendor
9. Invoices
10. Product cut sheets
11. Copies of orders
12. Brochures
13. Supplier Websites
14. Annual Reports

While all of these data sets have been around for years, you may also have an ERP system, Data Warehouse, spend cubes for either or any number of new AI tools related to these systems. The old saying goes, garbage in, garbage out! The question is do you trust your data?

If you’d like some help with your category discovery and have a General Ledger you’d like analyzed, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Services Project Manager.

As always we look forward to and appreciate your comments

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