The following is an excerpt from our White Paper “The Art of Collaborative Procurement”!
Today’s post is by Ron Southard, Chairman and CEO at SafeSourcing Inc.
The following is an excerpt from our White Paper “The Art of Collaborative Procurement”!
The fact is neither internal nor external aggregate collaboration is happening on a large scale in many companies and collective organizations. This is especially true in mid-tier or loosely organized larger national and multinational organizations. The terms collaboration, collaborative partners, collaborative supply chains, collaborative commerce, and collaborative networks are often used when discussing procurement. It rolls off the tongue like everyone knows what they are talking about. According to Wikipedia, “Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together toward an intersection of common goals,” and, “an aggregate is a collection of items that are gathered together to form a total quantity.” Since collaboration can happen with groups or organizations of any size working together toward the same goal, it can also apply to virtually any business function. When we combine it with the word “aggregate” to form the collective eProcurement term “Collaborative Aggregation,” however, we arrive at something potentially meaningful. Collective buying organizations and share groups often combine purchasing volumes of comparable products and services in order to drive better discounts. Large companies often aggregate their purchases among departments and are doing the same thing across different operating groups or companies within a larger organization in order to drive economy of scale in purchasing. The unfortunate truth is that not much out-of-the-box thinking, or art is going on in this process. They are so involved in the process (weeds) that they cannot see the forest for the trees.
Check back tomorrow and we will talk about collaboration in the Retail Industry
If you would like to learn more about how our customers and suppliers collaborate and work together, please contact SafeSourcing.
