Archive for the ‘Procurement Tool’ Category
Friday, August 12th, 2011
Let’s first try to understand what analytics actually is. According to Wikipedia’ a simple definition of analytics is “the science of analysis”. A practical definition, however, would be that analytics is the process of obtaining an optimal or realistic decision based on existing data. Business managers may choose to make decisions based on past experiences or rules of thumb, or there might be other qualitative aspects to decision making; but unless there are data involved in the process, it would not be considered analytics.
So why can’t many companies afford analytics? The answer is because they are complex. In my early days of selling data warehouses with one of the industry leaders, in fact the best in the space today the combination and analysis of data from disparate functional areas of a business were nearly impossible. As such if a company was advanced enough to have this type of information it most likely existed in islands that evolved into departmental data marts like category management systems. These data marts ultimately evolved to complex databases with relational data models that allowed access of data contained in these disparate systems and then into on line analytical systems capable of managing massive amounts of data .
It’s probably no surprise that the early adopters of these technologies were the biggest of the big companies and governments. So when we get to analytics that support e-procurement systems or procurement systems in general, the systems that provide the analytics have to reside within a company’s corporately supported data model. If not, they initially at least have to have a procurement data model that supports data contained in ERP systems, Financial systems etc. Since the trend is not a backwards direction of recreating islands of information, pilots of these systems that show significant benefits, will only end up as a corporate roll out through integration within the corporate framework and data model.
I could go on to explain the expense and time associated with these implementations, but there is a reason that these solutions are not readily implemented within lower tier one and tier two retailers. Number one is that many still do not have easily accessible corporate views of data. Number two is the cost; resources and time to implement them are difficult for these companies to justify.
As such there continues to be a need (niche) for providers that understand retail from an operational and financial perspective that know where to look, what to ask for and can assemble, analyze and report on data the old way to support the procurement data requirements of mid tier one and tier two retailers.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in Business Sourcing, E-procurement, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Sourcing Strategy
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
However, we continue to see a reasonable uptick in the use of e-negotiation tools in retail and this author believes that some of the following quotes from a retail CEO and his team that watched their first reverse auction last week may be the reason why.
1. “This was pretty simple to do”
2. “If we hired someone we could do these ourselves with you guys”
3. “This is fun”
4. “You mean the reports are already available”
5. “I love the sports concept”
6. “It was easy to follow the marquis and what was going on from one screen”
7. “The multiple color schemes were great”
8. “I can’t believe how fast you guys set this up”
9. “We saved that much money and only have to pay what we discussed”
10. “Can we do another one today”
11. “I may get a promotion out of this”
12. “I love that calculator at the end of the bid process”
13. “I like all of the supplier data that was accessible during the auction”
14. “Now I know how the big guys get the pricing they do”
Why not join others that have come a little late to the party. You can still benefit because today’s tools are easier to use, more interactive, maintain your attention during an auction, integrate gaming technology to keep it fun and are lower cost than their predecessors. If you happen to have already been doing this for years, why not find an easier way or do it less expensively.
If you would like to have fun, save money and do it quickly, please visit us at www.safesoucing.com.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in Eprocurement Auction, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Reverse Auction, Reverse Auction Procurement, Sourcing Safe Products, Sourcing Strategy
Wednesday, April 6th, 2011
If you are not sourcing at least 30% of your cost of goods and services using e-procurement tools, you are lagging your industry leaders as well as being significantly behind other industries. As such; you are not getting the best costs and not driving the best margins for your company.
Reverse auctions since their inception more than a dozen years ago haven driven healthy competition amongst supplier companies. As such the results of a reverse auction can provide a great benchmark for both the buyer and the supplier. For the buyer the results can be used as a tool to evaluate how to best source other products and services. Additionally suppliers that are not the low quote or winning bid now have the opportunity to evaluate why that is and what they need to do in order to improve or to be more competitive in the market place. This of course is all happening without the need to collect, collate, compare or negotiate during the process. In other words it is happening transparently to the normal sourcing process. I watched a reverse auction today where 4 suppliers placed 180 quotes for a dozen line items in under 30 minutes. No buyer can do that. Additionally reverse auctions provide the opportunity for suppliers that are outside of your business area or knowledge base to bid for your business.
Possibly the single largest area of benefit to reverse auctions outside of price compression for procurement professionals is that it offers a significant opportunity for process improvement since most solution providers offer a standard process for hosting reverse auctions. Everything is done in one place using standard processes in building the event to the final analysis of the bids collected. Information availability is immediate for evaluation and is archived for easy access in the future. This reduces the overall procurement life cycle, eliminates or reduces the opportunity for human error, and provides a standard way to conduct and award business.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in Procurement Outsourcing, Procurement Purchasing, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool
Friday, January 21st, 2011
E-procurement tools make it easier today to conduct requests for information or RFI’s in a hosted format than in the past, but the fact is this particular e-procurement tool is not used often enough.
RFI’s are kind of free flowing in their format, but generally the first data companies should want to capture is specific information about the company you are interested in. Any good supplier database should be able to provide the following data for you without even having to ask or develop a single question.
1. Company name
2. Company address
3. Parent company
4. Describe ownership and/or strategic partnerships of your company
5. Name and signature of the person responsible for the information contained in this RFI
6. Phone number
7. Fax number
8. E-mail address
9. Web site URL
10. Company location (corporate office; other offices)
11. Total number of employees (include breakdown per department, if possible)
12. Employee turnover rate
13. Employee satisfaction rating (if available)
14. Key employees names and employment contracts
15. Total revenue:
16. This year
17. Last year
18. Total profit/loss:
19. This year
20. Last year
21. When was your company’s initial year of operation?
22. Company Description:
23. Product categories offered:
Once you have collected this type of information the next step is to get product specific at a high level. And remember don’t turn your RFI’s into RFP’s, that’s the next step.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in E-procurement Tools, Procurement Tool
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
I was reading a blog post from the Doctor over at Sourcing Innovation today titled “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to e-Procurement: Terminology” and I thought it was great as well as very timely.
Ultimately it is up to practitioners and solution providers of these tools to educate their customers as to what the proper terms are for the tools they are using. As an example E-RFI, E-RFP, E-RFQ. I have numbers of customers that have used other solution providers and not only are the definitions different by customer; they are actually different within a specific company. In some cases everything is referred to as a reverse auction and in other situations the companies have made up their own name for the service or tool.
This author uses Wikipedia and Wictionary quite often as a source and in this case, they have a very good definition that covers most of the terminology in the entire e-procurement space as well as related B2B and B2C internet based or private network based functions. As your company moves in the direction of a computerized supply chain management solution for your company understanding what you are asking for and what you are using will make both your job and that of your solution provider easier.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in B2b Reverse Auction, B2b Supply Chain, E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, E-supply Chain, Eprocurement Auction, Online Procurement, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Auctioning, Procurement Outsourcing, Procurement Purchasing, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Product Procurement, Reverse Auction, Reverse Auction Procurement, Supply Chain 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
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
A Forward Auction is part of most e-negotiation tool belts. Probably the most well known type of forward auctions are those run by eBay. These tools are often overlooked as a way for companies to sell items that represent overstock, out of cycle, buffer stock, new old stock and other types of inventory that has been paid for and not sold through.
Placing these items for sale on your e-procurement provider’s website so that buyers from a variety of formats such as dollar stores, liquidation companies and other overstock resellers can bid for the items can positively impact shrink.
The simple philosophy here is that getting something for inventory that has already been paid for is better than getting nothing. The biggest dilemma to this solution is that most retailers do not know what is in the back rooms of their stores or how long it has been there.
An issue the above can create is the misinterpretation that shrinkage caused by employee theft, error or other mistakes is actually higher than it is.
There are any numbers of sources that report on annual retail shrinkage numbers. It is safe to say that average shrink numbers across the retail industry has hovered around 3% for years, although you will find significantly higher numbers by specific retail industry vertical.
The fact is that for a one billion dollar supermarket company, this represents $30,000,000.00 annually. With net earnings in this vertical averaging 1%, a reduction in shrink of 33% can improve earnings by as much as 100%.
A quick hit to these numbers can be accomplished by a forward auction. What do you have to lose? Better yet, what do you have to gain?
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in Business Sourcing, E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, Eprocurement Auction, Online Procurement, Procurement Auctioning, Procurement Outsourcing, Procurement Purchasing, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
If you have a limited source of new suppliers, including new vendors every time you run a new e-negotiation event will be incredibly difficult. Resultantly your process by default ends up as just a new way to continue to award business to the same suppliers over and over again. This process may yield some productivity increases initially, but over time meaningful price compression will be difficult if not impossible.
Solution providers suggest that somewhere between six and ten suppliers are required to drive optimum e-negotiation results, these data suggest that attaining sustainable results from the e-negotiation process has a direct correlation to the number of new suppliers available and willing to compete for your business.
By example let’s suppose you can only find six suppliers to invite to an e-negotiation event. Your customer services team using their best sales skills can probably convince most if not all of these suppliers to participate. This may be fine the first time around. Although this author believes there are better sustainability strategy even given this scenario.
Suppliers that finished first or second or incumbents that were displaced may agree to participate again in the future, but with a smaller number of suppliers and no new sources it will make the rerun of this auction less successful.
Lacking a robust source of new suppliers, and in the above case we only had a total of six available how can companies create a sustainable process.
The lack of a robust global supplier database limits future price compression at a minimum. It may also have a negative impact on quality, process and service. Particularly if history suggests a minimum of six to ten suppliers in order to drive optimum results…
Make sure to ask your e-negotiation solutions provider how many suppliers they have in their supplier database and if you can have regular access, it will determine your future success.
We appreciate and look forward to your comments
Posted in E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, E-supply Chain, Global E-procurement, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Sourcing Strategy, Strategic Sourcing, Supply Chain Procurement
Monday, May 24th, 2010
Part III Reasons to Use E-Procurement
Sometimes an explanation can be lost in translation so we have developed the following 20 reasons why utilizing the technology-based e-procurement process can provide significant benefits to you and your company. These are certainly not all of the benefits that can be derived from the use of the e-procurement process, but it is a good starting point.
While this list is not ranked in order of importance, many might argue that not much is more important than the #1 item which is improved earnings.
• Improve net earnings
• Enhance safety
• Reinforce corporate social responsibility
• Find new sources of supply
• Streamline the procurement process
• Elevate supplier accountability to meet your standards
• Improve quality
• Reduce costs in a volatile market
• Ensure a competitive environment
• Buy at market pricing
• Maintain a reliable history for comparison
• Educate suppliers as to how you wish to procure products
• Eliminates questions through effective supplier training
• Maintain consistent product specifications
• Improve negotiation
• Improve carbon footprint
• Simplify your “award of business” process
• Free up time for other tasks
• Process works for all product categories
• Provide a detailed audit trail
E-procurement offers many benefits for a broad range of companies in a variety of industries, assuming that the process selected is a high quality system with an extensive supplier database. We must also assume that the e-procurement process is implemented properly with the purchasing company and that the experienced e-procurement system provider works in concert with the buyer in order to realize optimal cost savings.
Numerous technology advancements have streamlined the e-procurement process and made it more user-friendly and less expensive. A company today can expect to reap significant benefits from e-procurement, including: saving money on purchases, reducing the time involved in the purchasing process, tracking current and archival activities and results, eliminating waste and improving the overall efficiency of the supply chain.
Take advantage of the technology advancements and don’t overlook the benefits of implementing an e-procurement process to strengthen your company’s bottom line.
To download copies of this entire article please use the following link.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, Eprocurement Auction, Global E-procurement, Green eProcurement Practices, Online Procurement, Procurement Auctioning, Procurement Company, Procurement Outsourcing, Procurement Purchasing, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Product Procurement, Reverse Auction Procurement, Supply Chain Procurement
Friday, May 21st, 2010
Getting Started
First and foremost in getting the e-procurement process right is to select a solution provider or partner that knows what they are doing and is willing to work closely with you during the early part of the process. The e-procurement plan for each company will be somewhat different in order to meet the specific needs of the company. There is however a general order to things that will provide the best opportunity for success.
To realize the most benefit from your e-procurement process, you will need to:
• Develop your strategy
• Complete a detailed discovery
• Learn to understand how to set up your procurement events, even if handled by your provider.
• Use a provider with a high quality process and an extensive database for sourcing suppliers
• Clearly communicate how events will be run or executed to all involved parties • Review the process for sustainability and adjust as necessary
As mentioned earlier, it is incumbent upon your e-procurement solutions provider to be able to assist you in completing these tasks in a reasonable period of time. You should be checking the background of the team and the leadership that will be assisting you to ensure their understanding of your industry such as operations, technology, procurement, warehouse management, logistics, transportation, loss prevention, store management and other functional areas of your business that will be sourcing products and services. It is all about detail because knowledgeable attention to detail will improve quality, reduce costs and ensure the success of your company’s new e-procurement process.
Please join us for part III of this post series on Monday titled Reasons to Use E-Procurement.
To download the entire article please use the following link.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, Eprocurement Auction, Global E-procurement, Green eProcurement Practices, Procurement Auctioning, Procurement Company, Procurement Outsourcing, Procurement Purchasing, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Product Procurement, Reverse Auction Procurement
