Archive for the ‘Online Reverse Auction’ Category
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
Just because you need to buy a product or service does not mean that you will receive the optimal price for that product. For certain products there are better times to run e-procurement events and if you miss that opportunity by even a couple of weeks the lost savings could be astronomical.
Some consumers give this considerable thought when they buy products like cars, computers, televisions, furniture and even certain food products. Retail buyers should be doing the same. If you are the poultry buyer planning for Thanksgiving, you do not want to be buying your frozen turkeys in July and quite frankly if you buy them in March you are probably going to miss out on some savings. The same could be said for just about any type of fresh produce. You can certainly get everything in today’s world at any time of year, but there are better times to do it than others.
A couple of tangential examples that require careful thought would be landscaping services and snow removal services for store parking lots and distribution centers. The services for the most part may be provided by the same suppliers. The optimal time to source landscaping may be the month of March while the optimal time for sourcing snow removal services may be September. These months also mark the beginning and end of the respective service seasons for each service. Even though you may get the service from the same provider, keeping the services separate leaves the leverage with the retailer when you source the other service for the upcoming season. This is also the time when the suppliers are looking for business that will sustain them through the upcoming season as another winds down.
Make sure you ask your e-procurement solutions provider to assist you with the apropriate timing to source your goods and services.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Auctioning, Reverse Auction, Reverse Auction Procurement
Monday, August 2nd, 2010
My wife went to lunch at a restaurant she has never been to before with 7 of her friends the other day. One of her friends called in advance and asked to speak with the executive chef. She told him she was coming for lunch with 7 of her friends and wanted to have the chef prepare a sampling of their best appetizers for the group and would like the restaurant to comp the expense for the group. Are you kidding me that is incredibly ballsy? Here’s the kicker, the restaurant did it. In addition the chef came to the table and explained the selection and what would go well with it for lunch. He also bought each attendee a glass of wine. Most of you are smart enough to figure out the benefit to the restaurant. I can guarantee you we will go there for dinner.
Here’s the tie in.
I always suggest to retailers that there is more to be gained from reverse auctions and other e-procurement events than just price concessions. With that said, cost still tends to be the primary driver or motivation for most retailers. The question always comes back to me; like what? My answer is that you have to use your imagination. Take a look at your product. Ask yourself what more would you like?
1. A better price?
2. An extended warranty for free?
3. Free shipping?
4. An onsite account manager?
5. Premium club membership?
6. One free night for every three nights stayed in a hotel chain?
7. One car grade upgrade from your standard contract for free?
8. 100 free meals for every $10K spent at a specific restaurant chain?
9. Free installation services
10. A donation to your frequent shopper program gifts catalog.
This really becomes a brainstorming or whiteboard event. Once you come up with an idea relative to a certain product, just ask for it in your specification. You’ll never know if you don’t ask.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in B2b Reverse Auction, E-procurement Tools, Online Reverse Auction, Strategic Sourcing
Friday, July 30th, 2010
A reserve is also sometimes called the desired price, or a “qualification price”. Careful thought is required on the part of the retailer in determining their reserve price. Quite often retailers just rely on their existing or current price from their last contract. If careful thought is not given, this may in fact create an unreasonable expectation that results in less participation from prospective suppliers, particularly if the market has changed dramatically in an upward direction since the last award of business. You have to be very careful that once a reserve is met that suppliers will stop bidding because you have already indicated your desire price point.
In a reserve revere auction if the bidding does not reach the “reserve price”, the buyer is not obligated to award the business based on the results of the reverse auction. This can also add risk to the participation level of suppliers. However once the reserve price is met, the buyer is obligated to award the business to a participating supplier or group suppliers based on previously published auction rules. Most reverse auctions today include terms and conditions that protect the retailer from awarding the business whether the reserve is met or not. This author would caution that if you are just trying to collect prices to analyze market conditions, tell the suppliers up front. If you set a reserve plan to award the business.
Additional pricing considerations can be given to adding other price points or qualifiers in a reserve price reverse auction such as entering a market price. In the case of fuel, this may be from a price index such as OPIS, Platt or Gulf Coast. This information can be visible or blind to the supplier, but let’s the retailer compare a suppliers mark up strategies. This also offers a nice opportunity to calculate cost avoidance during an up market.
We don’t see reserve auctions to often anymore, but understanding the different types of formats and tools available to you and assessing them in your event setup for their potential impact can add to the quality of the data collected and the event itself.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments
Posted in B2b Reverse Auction, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Auctioning, Reverse Auction, Reverse Auction Procurement
Monday, July 26th, 2010
This author has posted a number of times on twenty reasons why retailers should use e-procurement tools including everything in the procure to pay process. I post that subject a number of times a year. Quite frankly there are many more than twenty reasons. Here is a different type of look at the same subject.
1. It’s about the money.
2. It’s not about the money.
3. You don’t have specifications even if you think you do.
4. You will have specifications once the event is complete.
5. You have great relationships with all of your suppliers.
6. You don’t have great relationships with all of your suppliers.
7. You don’t know where to find additional sources of supply?
8. You will have at least 8-10 new sources of supply for every category you run.
9. All of your management team collaborate and make sure they aggregate their purchases. No they don’t.
10. You are getting the best prices in the market according to your buyers.
11. Believe me; you are not getting the best prices in your market.
12. All of your contracts are less than two years old! Ha, Ha Ha! They should be.
13. All of your overstock and out of cycle inventory has been removed from the back rooms of your stores! If it had, your shrink would be lower.
14. You are aware of all of your suppliers green and safety programs?
15. You are taking advantage of all of your suppliers green and safety programs.
16. You are measuring all of your commodity purchases against the appropriate indices.
17. You are getting the best use of your team because they have all the tools they need in order to source products and services efficiently.
18. Your people could be spending more time on more important projects if they used low cost SaaS e-procurement tools.
19. You have never had a contract auto renew or evergreen that cost you money.
20. All products and services you buy are top quality because you evaluate them regularly.
If you can only find three issues above that plague your operation, then you should be using e-procurement tools. Call us today. We’ll do the first one for free.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in B2b Supply Chain, Business Sourcing, E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, Online Reverse Auction, Strategic Sourcing
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
Obviously all retail companies would like to focus on all three areas and there are even sub sections of these top line areas that we could spell out as needing attention. The challenge is where to deploy already taxed resources?
It does not require an accountant to figure this out. If we assume that COGS or cost of goods and services is about 75% of top line revenue that would result in a simple gross margin of 25%. Based on a number of industry reports we are also safe using a shrink number of 3% of top line revenue.
This author is aware that there area a few companies with shrink below 1% and cost of goods below 75% which means there are also companies with gross margin better than 25%. The obvious question is; are these companies that solution providers want to target for profit improvement sales? Probably not.
So let’s look at an example of shrink improvement with data analysis tools and process improvement tools versus cost compression with SaaS e-procurement tools. Let’s assume we have a company that does top line sales of $1B. Using a shrink number of 3% shrink would be $30M annually. If you were able to reduce shrink by a third in one year, profit improvement would be $10M. If this were a supermarket company with a 1% bottom line or $10M, improvement could be as much as 100%.
Now let’s take a look at reduction in cost. If we assume the same company has COGS of 75% or $750M and that we were only going to address 20% of that number or $150 and only reduce those costs by 20% which is slightly above industry averages the net profit improvement would be $30M or 300% improvement in year over year net profit. If we were only able to achieve 10% savings which is well below industry averages, net profit would improve by 150%.
I’ll leave the gross margin example for you to figure out. In the above case it is clear that attacking COGS has an impact on the bottom line of up to 3 to 1 versus addressing shrink with your already taxed resources.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, Online Procurement, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Outsourcing
Monday, June 21st, 2010
SafeSourcing has averaged over 30% savings for the entire time we have been in business across hundreds of millions in spend volume. This includes single event spends as small as $20K and as large event spends as large as hundreds of millions. You can rest assured that you can source all products and services with SafeSourcing regardless of how small or how large.
We believe there are very important reasons for these results. A few are as follows.
1. Our Event Template Library.
2. The SafeSourceIt™ Supplier Database with over 380,000 sources of supply.
3. Our customer services to assist buyers in building quality specifications quickly.
4. Event setup strategies that drive the best results.
5. Time to event.
6. Percentage of new suppliers per event.
So, here is the offer. Source any product or category regardless of the size of the spend and if you don’t save at least 15% THE EVENT IS FREE. Experience the difference for yourself in retail e-procurement leadership.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments
Posted in B2b Reverse Auction, Eprocurement Auction, Online Procurement, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Company, Reverse Auction, Reverse Auction Procurement
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
What troubles this author most about this is that the industries included in the Aberdeen Group study such as education, manufacturing, energy, utilities, financial services and others are all using these tools to trim their costs and improve earnings. Retail has had at best terrible earnings numbers historically with the supermarket industry averaging net earnings of below one percent (1%).
I was just talking with our CFO today about the impact of these tools. I used a very realistic example of a $2B supermarket company with one percent net earnings of $20M. I can see the board now. If the same retailer were to source as little as $10M of their budgeted spend and reduced costs by just 20% or $2M, net earnings would improve in the budgeted year by 10%. If you are a CFO and can’t get excited about that, I’m not sure what would excite you.
This is not just rhetoric. We have customers with savings that are almost double that with a huge resulting impact on earnings. I know that there are a lot of bloggers and others out there that doubt the impact of e-procurement tools or think that reverse auctions as an example have run their course. Quite frankly that thinking is misguided because in the retail industry the large majority of companies have never used these tools and have been doing business with many of the same suppliers for more than two years. These are both indicators of the fact that you are overpaying for products and services.
You can be comfortable and be busy or you can grab the bull by the horns and improve costs, earnings, stock price and even the bonuses of your management team.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in Business Sourcing, E-procurement Tools, Eprocurement Auction, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Reverse Auction Procurement, Strategic Sourcing
Friday, May 7th, 2010
It hardly seems possible that we launched our company two years ago. At the time there were indicators for those paying attention of trouble in the global economy but know one had any idea just how bad it was going to get. In hindsight what a time to launch a company. When customers and business partners asked me why, my response was if you are doing what you believe in and the results you promise are true, then there really is no bad time to launch a business.
Our promise has been the same from day one, to reduce the cost of goods and services regardless of a company’s size or the size of the category being sourced. And, while doing so improve quality, safety and environmental focus. Today, two years later our customers will attest to the fact that we have held true to that promise.
Following is a short list of accomplishments that we are very proud of.
1. Over 700 educational blog posts relative to e-procurement issues of importance.
2. Over 1500 useful procurement related wiki terms and definitions.
3. Added an average of more than one new customer for every month in business.
4. Grew our supplier data base to greater than 380,000 retail suppliers
5. Sourced 100’s of categories from commodities to finished goods and services.
6. Sourced categories as small as $5K with savings > 30%.
7. Sourced categories as high as $80M.
8. Never held an e-negotiation event that did not result in savings.
9. Conducted every process in e-procurement including RFI, RFP and RFQ.
10. Installed our product in Asia in a multi lingual implementation.
11. Averaged over 24% savings over two years.
12. Developed a unique process for sourcing small spends for the retail mid market.
13. Grew our database to over a terabyte of data.
14. Helped companies source with environmental and social consciousness
15. Today released SafeContract™ a fully featured hosted Contract Management System.
To our customers thank you for your support. We endeavor to earn your business every day. To our business partners thank you for your guidance during a tough economic period. To the retail industry our goal is to be your best vehicle for reducing costs and improving earnings with an increased focus on corporate social responsibility.
Thank You.
Posted in B2b Reverse Auction, B2b Supply Chain, Business Sourcing, E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, E-supply Chain, Eprocurement Auction, Global E-procurement, Green eProcurement Practices, Online Procurement, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Auctioning, Procurement Company, Procurement Outsourcing, Procurement Purchasing, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Product Procurement, Retail Supply Chain, Reverse Auction, Reverse Auction Procurement, Sourcing Safe Foods, Sourcing Safe Products, Sourcing Strategy, Strategic Sourcing, Supply Chain Procurement
Monday, April 19th, 2010
There really is no reason to shy away from taking any product or service to reverse auction as part of your overall e-negotiation strategy to compress pricing.
There are however some simple questions companies can ask themselves when considering any product, service, or category for consideration in the e-negotiation process. Several but not all of those questions would certainly include the following three.
1. How many suppliers are available and willing to bid on your business?
It’s obvious your company is already aware of your incumbent suppliers. The more important question is what other suppliers are available and how can you find them.
Several will exist within you own geographical area that you are not even aware of. Many others may be located across the country that are also very interested in earning your business.
2. Does your company have the complete detailed product specifications for this product or service readily available or are you familiar with a source from which you can get them easily?
Are your products specifications kept in some form of central repository or are they in the mind of your buyer? This is the single largest obstacle to successful e-negotiation events.
3. How much of the product or service are you willing to commit to buy over what period of time?
What period of time are you buying for? Is there an opportunity to contract for a longer period of time in order to raise volumes? Is there an opportunity to aggregate dissimilar products in order to increase the e-auction size?
If you are well prepared, there are suppliers willing to bid for your business that offer quality equal to or better than what you are presently receiving for your products and services at a better price and with better service. That’s win-win-win.
We always look forward to and appreciate your comments
Posted in E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, Online Procurement, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Auctioning, Procurement Solutions, Strategic Sourcing
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
This author has met with many large companies that are using e-sourcing suites or tools provided by some of the largest names in the industry. After we have reviewed what we do and how we do it and then compare what they are accomplishing the following question always comes up. Why are you generating significantly higher savings than we are?
The answer is pretty simple in most cases. You have bought a software suite or tools and rather than using them as designed you have just incorporated your old practices into new tools. In addition, further training or access to your supplier’s data in the form of sources of supply etc. was not included in your initial cost.
A full service solution provider should be able to create, execute and support all auction activity including but not limited to the following.
1. Assistance in selecting Auction categories
2. Market insight
3. Determine the timing of category auction
4. Identification of potential quality suppliers in addition to existing
5. Building on-line auctions
6. Supplier contacts and training
7. Execution of live bids
8. Trouble shooting during live bids
9. Compiling and communicating reports within 24 hours
10. Award and Non-Award notifications to Suppliers
11. Providing ongoing customer support
12. Monitoring Supplier performance
13. Feedback from Retailers/Suppliers
14. Analyze the quality of each auction
The above deliverables if not executed in a self service program will result in less than maximum results and potentially failure of your program.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in B2b Reverse Auction, B2b Supply Chain, Business Sourcing, E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, Online Procurement, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Purchasing, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool
