Archive for the ‘Procurement Tool’ Category
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
In this case your supplier wins because your contract contains evergreen language. Some retailer’s think this is a good thing and it could be. Paired with other language that might identify escalator or de-escalator language that protects both the supplier and the buyer against abnormal commodity increases this could be win-win. The bigger issue is who is responsible for monitoring the dates and how will you be alerted if the adjustments don’t take place?
This begs the question; just what are are evergreen clauses within a contract and what do you need to do to be careful with them.
According to Black’s Law Dictionary an Evergreen contract is a contract that renews itself from one term to the next in the absence of contrary notice by one of the parties.
The potential problem with an “evergreen” clause in your contract is that this type of contract automatically renews at the end of the contract term, unless one of the parties notifies the other party that it does not want to renew the contract. This notice normally must be given within a specified time period such as 60 to 90 days prior to the end of the current contract term. This takes us back to who is going to monitor this time frame and alert you to the fact that something is required?
A significant step in conducting quality e-negotiation events is to understand the contracts you are wishing to negotiate.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in B2b Reverse Auction, B2b Supply Chain, E-procurement, E-procurement Tools, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Auctioning, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
And for those very large retail companies that have very expensive internal tools that were sold to you by the largest players in the space. Ask yourself why your event savings are much less than those reported by companies who have outsourced this functionality? If you want to drive the greatest possible savings across the broadest range of categories in the shortest amount of time; and have a sustainable process moving forward keep reading..
The question one needs to ask is; what type of event services does my e-procurement provider offer? If your company is deciding to try self service, which is to be 100% self-sufficient, you need to know if your provider offers readily available classroom education that can be conducted on-site in order to train your team in all the nuances of event support. These skills are the foundation that allows e-procurement providers to support large volumes of events in a full service mode, which drive greater savings over the long term. Knowledge transfer in this area is one thing; the passion, skill and headcount to carry out these practices on a day by day basis are what drive results.
Typically event services falls into two broad categories:
1. Event management
2. Event monitoring and support.
Event management provides end to end e-sourcing support that begins with a companies overall strategy and ends with the actual execution of the e-procurement event. This is a true cross category effort that includes a rather lengthy list of services that may include buyer training, supplier selection, category discovery, supplier communication, the strategy for taking a category to market, training and overall supplier expectation management.
Event monitoring and support is actually the tactical implementation of the over all e-procurement event management process. This may include all communications with suppliers on the day of an event including making sure they have access to the system, get logged in properly, don’t have problems placing quotes, monitoring supplier and buyer system communications techniques during an event such as notes and texting and being available post event for questions as needed.
These services are normally provided by people behind the scenes with a very specific skill set. If you plan to do self service it would be very wise to make sure you have them covered at the same quality level.
As always, we look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in B2b Reverse Auction, E-procurement, E-procurement Solutions, E-procurement Tools, Eprocurement Auction, Online Procurement, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Auctioning, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Product Procurement, Retail Supply Chain, Reverse Auction, Strategic Sourcing, Supply Chain Procurement
Friday, February 5th, 2010
Best practices only become best practices through a thoughtful paying forward of one’s careers learning to others in order to shorten their educational curve to the ultimate benefit of customers, partners and other stakeholders they may interface with in the hope that they will do the same thing.
According to Wikipedia a best practice asserts that there is a technique, method, process, activity, incentive or reward that is more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique, method, process, etc.
When a company indicates to you that they use best practices, does this mean they are supporting what is the best practice for the entire industry they serve such as the procurement space. Or does it mean they are the best practices for just their particular product family?
This author does not believe that a best practice is just following a standard way of doing things that can be carried out by multiple organizations. A best practice is a life long process that by its nature has to evolve over time as tools, businesses, and existing processes change so that a current practitioner performs similar tasks more efficiently or cost effectively.
If one uses best practices, the result should be an ideal state that a person or an organization set out to achieve in the first place. In fact if the process used is actually a best practice shouldn’t all of a companies customers use exactly the same process. I’m not sure that this is ever a question one asks when looking for a referral about a companies service offerings. Please tell me about your companies’ best practice? Are they consistent and carried out each and every time to the desired result?
One way to ensure good quality results is to provide templates that can be used over and over again and are evaluated at the completion of each practice or session of a particular deliverable and changed as need be. This then requires passage to other customers in order to insure the integrity of the process. This elevates the actual process beyond just a buzzword and moves a particular process in the direction of becoming a best practice that drives similar results on a consistent basis regardless of customer.
This author will continue to refer to our services offerings as high quality process techniques focused on continuous improvement that deliver anticipated results. Our customers, supplier participants and business partners will determine if they are best practices for them.
We look forward to and appreaciate your comments.
Posted in E-procurement Solutions, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Sourcing Strategy, Strategic Sourcing
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
ISO has published a new, updated brochure providing a basic introduction, as its title indicates, to Environmental management – The ISO 14000 family of International Standards. The 12-page, color brochure is the latest edition of a successful publication first released in 1998, two years after the launching of the first standards in the ISO 14000 family
The International Organization for Standardization widely known as ISO, is an international standard -setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates world-wide industrial and commercial standards. It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. While ISO defines itself as a non – governmental, its ability to set standards that often become law, either through treaties or national standards makes it more powerful than most non-governmental organizations. In practice, ISO acts as a consortium with strong links to governments.
The SafeSourceIt™ Supplier Database holds it suppliers accountable to many ISO standards including 14000, 7002, 9001 and 22000.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in E-supply Chain, Procurement Tool, Retail Supply Chain, Sourcing Safe Foods
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
During the last ninety day period the SafeSourcing website www.safesourcing.com has experienced significant growth globally. According to a number of rating services including Alexa and Google Analytics our website has had visitors from thirty seven (37) countries. Our reach which is a percentage measure of global internet users has grown 130%. Our traffic rank has increased 168% and our page views have increased 150%.
This growth places us amongst the top websites in the procurement space. Spend Matters and Sourcing Innovation continue to be the ranking leaders in our space. Both are required daily reading for this author.
We are very proud of our growth as it indicates that SafeSourcing is providing valuable content to regular visitors as well as registered members. We are also enjoying a good mix of both returning and new users. In reviewing these data the entire website is being explored on a regular basis including the following areas.
1. Sourcebook our professional social network for procurement professionals.
2. The SafeSourcing Wiki
3. The SafeSourcing daily Blog
4. SafeSourcing environment and safety alerts
5. SafeSourcing specifications template library
6. The SafeSourceIt™ Supplier Database
7. The SafeSourcing Query tool
8. SafeSourcing Product Information Sheets
9. SafeSourcing White Papers
10. SafeSourcing Press Releases.
Thank you to those of you that have allowed us to achieve this growth.
As always, 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, E-supply Chain, Eprocurement Auction, Global E-procurement, Online Procurement, Online Reverse Auction, Procurement Auctioning, Procurement Company, Procurement Outsourcing, Procurement Purchasing, Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Product Procurement, Reverse Auction, Reverse Auction Procurement, Sourcing Strategy, Strategic Sourcing, Supply Chain Procurement
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
From a purely systematic or technological perspective, a wizard is a computer user interface that leads a user through dialog steps in order to accomplish something easily or for the sake of appearances magically. So to begin with if you are not using technology in your retail procurement practices this would be a good place to start. You can never tell improved profits may simply be as easy as abracadabra.
Magic which is practiced by wizards is the act of performing, entertaining or enlightening an audience by creating illusions of seemingly impossible feats, using purely natural means. As an example; maybe finding new sources of supply in order to compress a retailers pricing is as simple as having access to a supplier database (hidden knowledge) that can conjure up new sources of supply through an easy to use interface (wizard). Since most retailers do not know that such a database exits, a novice supply chain team member or apprentice (audience participant) could conjure up a query on their PDA (magic wand) that searches this database (universe) by major category, country, postal code, sub-category, safety certifications or other incantations, and in less than 15 seconds produce a result set of 200 suppliers seemingly from thin air. This act of prestidigitation to most retailers would appear as magic. To his or her boss (lord or lady) this novice or apprentice team member would be looked at as a wizard, magician or seer.
Call your solution provider and see what type of sorcery they can share with you. If they can’t, call SafeSourcing the sorcerers of sourcing.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
Posted in Procurement Solutions, Procurement Tool, Product Procurement, Retail Supply Chain, Sourcing Strategy
