Today’s post id by Ronald D. Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc.

I asked you to Check back today to learn more about the types of data I discussed in the whitepaper.

The following is second excerpt from my White Paper Titled Re-Imagining Procurement where I will discuss my view of the types and availability of the data that you have to work with. In doing so, please remember the old saying of “Garbage in Garbage out”. Oh, that it was not still true today!

For our purposes I like to place this data as the following Three Pillars:

1. Pillar One – Your Data: This is the data that your company has available that can be accessed and used in the procurement process. Where is it and who controls it?
2. Pillar Two – Our Data: This is your e-Procurement provider’s data such as specifications, templates, and historical category data. I call this our data because SafeSourcing is a Cloud based SaaS provided Procure to Pay SafeSourceIt™ family of solutions. See a summary below.
3. Pillar Three – Their Data: This is the Suppliers or Vendors Data. This will include all data associated with getting the best possible product or service at the best possible price, at the exact location, and at the exact time it is needed.

The first question that should come to mind is where this data comes from both internally and externally. The answer is that it depends. It depends on how sophisticated your internal business solutions and processes are and the level of drill down (meta data) that is available in your business systems and how well they interact or are linked for a corporate view.

1. Here is an example: Company A has a purchase order system that has all the attributes required to provide a clear historical view of what has been purchased. The CPO asks a procurement professional to get a copy of the P.O. for a particular product or service that has been purchased. The requested P.O. arrives and has one line on the entire document that reads per the attached purchase and sales order (a vendor document). Come on, admit it. This has happened to you more than once and it will continue to. So now what? Get a copy of the order from the vendor? Cool idea. When it arrives, the pricing is different, so what now. Let us review the contract. Who has the original signed copy? Get my drift?

SafeSourcing is a data rich company built to support procurement professionals. Included on our website are several million words in the form of white papers, a sourcing wiki, a specifications library, a daily blog focused on procurement and a supplier database including a query tool that allows you to search global sources of supply. There are many more tools and data sets that are here to make your life easier.

If you’d like to discuss the use of our data or have us review yours, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate, please click here.