Archive for September, 2022

Just what does SafeSourcing mean by eProcurement White Glove Services?

Friday, September 30th, 2022

 

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

A customer asked me this question today. While there are some fifty-four specific touch points in our SafeSourceIt™ online event check list or project plan that are aligned by customer responsibility and SafeSourcing responsibility. What follows was my answer without touching on each. My only addition was to ask your provider if they include all of this in their pricing without engaging third parties.

 SafeSourcing Responsibilities:

  • Category Selection Guidance
  • Category Event Strategy
  • Terms and Conditions Development
  • Supplier Research
  • Specifications Documentation
  • Supplier Invitations
  • Supplier Q&A
  • Supplier Training on SafeSourceIt™ Platform
  • Host Live Event
  • Provide Final Report Package and Recommendations
  • Request Samples if Required
  • Send System Thankyou to all participants
  • Send Award Decision to all participants.

Customer Responsibilities:

  • Designate executive sponsor, if applicable.
  • Designate project champion/manager.
  • Provide item specifications for the selected category.
  • Provide incumbent supplier information and invoice copies.

SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay SaaS based provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions and associated white glove services that are part of our SaaS offered SafeSourceIt™ eSourcing suite. These include but are not limited to SafeContract™, SafePO™, SafeDocument™ and our SafeSourceIt™ Global Supplier Database that includes over 557,000 vendor/suppliers.

To learn more, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate.

 

How does your company ensure contract compliance?

Tuesday, September 27th, 2022

 

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

SafeCatalog™ is a one tool that allows companies to reinforce rules that supports contract compliance, thus ensuring that hard earned discounts, terms, and conditions achieved by their procurement knowledge workers are maintained for the length of the contract.

SafeCatalog™ is a tool that allows companies to consolidate the products and services they order into one online view for employees. This tool is easily customizable and allows users to create different catalogs for multiple departments within their organization. It also provides control over ordering by listing only approved vendors at negotiated rates.

When integrated with the SafePO™ module, users can have their catalog orders automatically processed and entered to an online purchase order system that allows suppliers to be notified of the order once it has been approved.

Catalogs can be populated with items from one or multiple suppliers and are presented in a way that includes descriptions and provides prices in one location.

SafeCatalog™ provides users the leverage to monitor and control spending through spending thresholds that ensure that users are receiving the correct price for all items.

SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay SaaS based provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions and associated white glove services that are part of our SaaS offered SafeSourceIt™ eSourcing suite. These include but are not limited to SafeContract™, SafePO™, SafeDocument™ and our SafeSourceIt™ Global Supplier Database that includes over 557,000 vendor/suppliers. To learn more, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate.

 

 How do you extend the life of garage doors  

Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

 

Today’s post is by Troy Lowe; Vice President of Development at SafeSourcing.

With the seasons changing and fall quickly upon us, winter will be here soon enough.  When winter approaches more people will now be making room in their garages for their automobiles.  Storing your vehicles in a garage during the winter season helps you to avoid scraping ice or snow off your vehicles and keeps it warmer so it will heat up quicker during your commute.  With colder temperatures on the way it may be time to have your garage doors maintained.  Below is a BLOG that I wrote a few years ago that still holds true.

Garage doors are expensive and need to be maintained to extend their life.  Some of the maintenance items can be done yourself while more complex maintenance items may require a trained technician.   It is a clever idea to inspect the doors and the hardware monthly to ensure that a small issue does not become a bigger more expensive issue.  To examine the hardware, close the door and inspect the springs, cables, rollers, etc. for any damage or wear.  Inspect the mounting hardware carefully and tighten any loose connections.  Make sure to check all the cables for any fraying.  If any of these parts are damaged they will need to be replaced.  Replacement of damaged parts may be difficult and require a trained technician.

One of the most important maintenance options is to make sure the door is well lubricated.  To ensure that it is, open and close the door and make sure that the door does not make any strange noises.  A noisy door could mean that it needs to be lubricated or some connections may have come loose.  If the door needs to be lubricated this can be done by applying a lithium-based spray grease or a silicon spray.  You want to use this type of spray to lubricate all moving parts of the door.  When lubricating the parts, make sure to close the door and disconnect the automatic garage door opener if one is attached.  Lubricate the parts of the door that are used to move the door along the tracks.  You want to lubricate all hinges, locks, and the arm bar as well.  Most garage doors come with either metal or plastic rollers.  If you have metal rollers you may be able to see the ball bearings in the center of the roller.  If so, use the tube on the spray bottle to lubricate the ball bearings within the roller.  Next, you want to grease all the pulleys.  As with the rollers, you want grease the exposed ball bearings located in the center of the pulleys.  Lastly, if your garage door has a torsion spring, remove the straw from the spray bottle and coat the spring and bearing plates.  When finished lubricating, move the garage door up and down to help spread the applied lubrication.  Reconnect the automatic garage door opener and open and close the door to ensure that it is connected properly.  The door should operate a little smoother and with less noise.

If during the inspection process you find an issue that requires a trained technician, feel free to contact SafeSourcing.   We can gather all the necessary information for you and help you decide which company meets your needs.  If you would like more information on how SafeSourcing can help you, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service representative.  We have an entire team ready to assist you today.

 

How to you choose your Suppliers/Vendors?

Friday, September 16th, 2022

 

Today’s blog is by Margaret Stewart, Director of HR, and Administration at SafeSourcing

Having the right vendor selection process can help your organization in the long run.

When it is time to select a vendor for whatever project you have underway, it is important to choose one that fits your needs the best, but first you will need to determine what your needs are and what your wants are.

Determining needs – First you will need to find a vendor that can provide the good or service you are looking for. This can be as easy as making a list of exactly what you need from your project. For a simple project, which can be fairly easy, but for more complex projects you may need to dive into capabilities. For example, if you need a plumber for a leaky faucet, you will find a number that can complete your project. However, if you need your water line under the ground replaced, you may need someone who specializes in that. The same concept applies to goods as well. If you are looking for the perfect cheese for your pizzas, you may want someone who specializes in cheddar shreds as opposed to one who sells a lot of aged charcuterie style blocks.

Determining your wants – after you find out what you need, next you will dive into what you want. Perhaps you want a plumber that offers flexible pricing options or may be someone who sells cheddar cheeses and nacho cheeses. Determining what you want can help narrow down the field. A list of wants can help steer your vendor selection down. A wonderful way to help with not only determining wants and needs, but also vendor selection, is having a procurement partner. A procurement partner, like SafeSourcing, can help you determine which vendors fit your needs and wants, and on top of that we can also collect valuable information and pricing for your next project.

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

 

SafeContract™ Protects your Savings

Wednesday, September 14th, 2022

 

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

How does your company protect their savings or reduced costs from your eProcurement events. The simple answer is to use the SafeSourcing Contract Management Solution.

SafeContract™ is a tool that companies can use to automate and improve their contract flow by electronically capturing their company’s contracts and contract details.

By implementing SafeContract™, companies can improve their contract cycles, standardize processes, reduce administrative costs, improve contract compliance, and increase the effectiveness of negotiations.

SafeContract™ provides financial, role, and organization security, as well as supporting regulatory compliance. It makes contract creation, contract activation, and contract compliance safe and easy to access and use.

The SafeSourceIt™ product family is a cloud-based Software as a Service offering. This allows companies to use as much or as little of the application family as they need. Companies can launch our services almost immediately at a cost well below what would be required to install and support a product behind a firewall. NO internal information technology resources are required and the SafeSourceIt™ solutions are accessible using all industry browsers.

For more information, please contact us at marketing@safesourcing.com.

What Educational Offerings does your eProcurement provider offer?

Tuesday, September 13th, 2022

 

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

SafeSourcing’s educational offerings support the SafeSourcing mission of providing information and services to our customers through e-procurement tools that proactively support consumer safety and environmental standards in the global supply chain. SafeSourcing educational offerings encompass the teaching and learning of specific e-procurement skills as regards:

  • Category to Market Strategy
  • Event Set-Up
  • Event Training
  • Supplier Selection
  • Buyer Training
  • Supplier Training
  • Category Discovery
  • Supplier Safety Certifications
  • Supplier Eco Practices
  • ROI Delivery

SafeSourcing also endeavors to do something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of retail e- procurement and supply chain knowledge, positive judgment and well-developed retail wisdom that supports a safer and more eco-friendly global supply chain while driving increased efficiency and improved profitability for our customers and their stakeholders. For more information, please https://www.safesourcing.com/Contact-Us

SafeSourceIt™ Templates Library

Friday, September 9th, 2022

 

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

What happens when you do not have a specification?

You would not believe how many companies when they go to source a category regardless of whether it is for cost of goods, expense, or capital projects, how often they have no specification. Additionally for most companies they only source this category once every year or two. The SafeSourcing Template Library contains thousands of specifications that are updated a frequently as we source them. To be honest, what this means is we know more about the category than anyone in your company because we source them dozens of times per year, and it takes us less time because of our template library.

The SafeSourcing event templates library is available to customers of SafeSourcing Inc. This library is designed to shorten the process of procuring a variety of not for resale and for resale products by making SafeSourcing’s best practices tools available to our customers to shorten the amount of work one must do to prepare for quality e-procurement events. For more information or a demonstration of this tool please contact marketing@safesourcing.com.

SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay SaaS based provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions and associated white glove services that are part of our SaaS offered SafeSourceIt™ eSourcing suite. These include but are not limited to SafeContract™, SafePO™, SafeDocument™ and our SafeSourceIt™ Global Supplier Database that includes over 557,000 vendor/suppliers. And Our SafeSourceIt™ Template Library contains specifications on categories sourced thousands of times.

To learn more, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate.

 

The SafeSourceIt™ Supplier Database

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

 

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

There is probably not a company in the world today that is not having supply chain issues. Either there is short supply resulting from fires, weather, pandemics, and a variety of other acts of God, or many of these companies are switching from prior sole source purchasing to multi source purchasing or visa versa in order to solve their supply chain problems. The question is where do you look and who vets these potentially new vendors for you?

The SafeSourceIt™ Supplier Database is one the largest eSourcing supplier databases in North America with over 527,000 suppliers. To achieve maximum savings when using an e-procurement event, you need numerous suppliers aggressively vying for your business. SafeSourcing customers can request summary or detailed data from the same tool and download it to a variety of file formats.

The SafeSourceIt™ Supplier Database Query Tool

Visitors to the SafeSourcing website can use The SafeSourceIt™ Supplier Database Query Tool to request summary data  from the database which appears as a count. If you are interested in the detailed data for the same query, please contact marketing@safesourcing.com.

Suppose you wanted to source general merchandise with a subcategory of electronics for the geography of New England (Six States). A simple query of our database would return the following instantly.

There are 158 suppliers matching these criteria.
For more detailed information on these suppliers please contact a
SafeSourcing.com customer service representative at 1-866-623-9006 or
email us at marketing@safesourcing.com.Thank you!

From this result set you can select to look at the detailed information for all or any portion of the dataset which can then be saved and downloaded.

If you would like to learn more, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate.

 

Category Development Index (CDI)

Wednesday, September 7th, 2022

 

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

What indices do you use to assist in your category development.

Often you can build your own CDI from data contained in many indices that are available via the web such as the Consumer Price Index or CPI, Gross Domestic Product or GDP and The Purchasing Managers Index or PMI that we discussed yesterday. Elements of each my find their way into your own custom Index od Category Development Index.

A Category Development Index, or CDI, is a trend analysis that indicates the turnover of sales of a given product category in a specific area. The CDI can give vital data for marketers to allocate advertising to specific areas maximizing product category knowledge and profit. The category Development Index is often used in conjunction with the Brand Development Index or BDI.

At SafeSourcing we often use a variety of indices in the development of our client-driven eRFI, eRFP and eRFQ or Reverse Auction strategies.

SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay SaaS based provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions and associated white glove services that are part of our SaaS offered SafeSourceIt™ eSourcing suite. These include but are not limited to SafeContract™, SafePO™, SafeDocument™ and our SafeSourceIt™ Global Supplier Database that includes over 557,000 vendor/suppliers. To learn more, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate.

 

 

What is the Purchasing Managers Index or PMI?

Tuesday, September 6th, 2022

 

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

Do you use The Purchasing Managers Index in your sourcing strategies? Do you know what it is?

This useful index is one that many purchasing managers and other procurement knowledge workers use to keep up with the ever-increasing speed of change in our area of expertise.

The Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) is an index of the prevailing direction of economic trends in the manufacturing and service sectors. It consists of a diffusion index that summarizes whether market conditions, as viewed by purchasing managers, are expanding, staying the same, or contracting. The purpose of the PMI is to provide information about current and future business conditions to company decision makers, analysts, and investors.

At SafeSourcing we often use this data in the development of our client-driven eRFI, eRFP and eRFQ or Reverse Auction strategies.

SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay SaaS based provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions and associated white glove services that are part of our SaaS offered SafeSourceIt™ eSourcing suite . These include but are not limited to SafeContract™, SafePO™, SafeDocument™ and our SafeSourceIt™ Global Supplier Database that includes over 557,000 vendor/suppliers. To learn more, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate.

Sources:

Investopedia: Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) Defined and How It Works (investopedia.com)

Wikipedia: Software as a service Wikipedia