Archive for October, 2018

Data Crash

Tuesday, October 30th, 2018

 

 

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

No one likes to think about it or experience it, but computer crashes happen. Crashes can happen to anyone, at any time, and due to a variety of reasons, like viruses, heat, errors in the operating system, and disk fails.  If this were to happen to you, what would you do?

Many of us are not so tech-savvy would try and do what we can ourselves. We’d turn it off and then back on and hope it was just in our imagination. While this seems to help many other times, if you’ve had a bad enough crash, this may do little to help. At this point, next steps might be calling your IT department, contacting a computer repair person, or possibly chucking your laptop into the trash out of pure frustration. Whatever your go-to, you may have already lost important data and files that simply cannot be retrieved.

While we all hope we don’t find ourselves in the above situation, there are things we can do to ensure a crash isn’t a detrimental as it could be. One way to ensure your data is safe is to back it up with an external hard drive or other device separate from your computer. This ensures your data is stored separately from those flawed operating systems that could potentially wipe your information. The downside to this is remembering to constantly sync your data to the drive and not accidentally deleting a file from the drive as it is permanently deleted.

Another option for securing your data is storing your files in the cloud, so that if your computer ever does crash you won’t lose any important files. SafeSourcing offers this application called SafeDocument™.  Here, your files are stored safely, securely, and far from reach of computer crashes. In addition, this tool saves a number of versions, so that if you save a document to the wrong name, you can easily access the information you need and nothing is lost. In addition, SafeDocument™ is available to you from anywhere you have internet access. That means if your laptop dies, you can still access all your documents from another computer. This allows you to keep working on what you need to without interruption and without the fear that your data could be lost in a crash.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can help in your document storage, or on our Risk Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service representative. We have an entire team ready to assist you today.http://safesourcing.com/ContactUs/tabid/60/language/en-US/Default.aspx

 

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What Would You Do? ​

Monday, October 29th, 2018

 

 

Today’s post is by Dave Wenig, Vice President of Sales and Services at SafeSourcing Inc..

We all have choices to make when it comes to managing our responsibilities. In procurement, we face choices with every purchase. When we enter into a new agreement, we have choices. When we renew an agreement, we have choices.

In this post, I’ll focus in on just one major choice that procurement professionals face when it comes time to renew an agreement with a vendor. Clearly, a renewal offers the purchaser an opportunity to review the current agreement and decide whether or not they intent to continue working with the vendor. This is also an opportunity for the vendor to make changes to the agreement, very commonly in the form of price increases.

However, the question of whether to renew with the incumbent vendor or not is a bit premature. The better question is around how we want to evaluate the agreement to make that decision. SafeSourcing clients know that they have access to a powerful set of eProcurement tools that will help them attain the best pricing possible with the best terms. If your vendor knows that you have these eProcurement tools, it’s natural that they might attempt to persuade you not to use them.

Do you want to negotiate the agreement fully, including using your eProcurement tools, or do you want to accept the offer that the vendor made for renewal? This question becomes a bit more complicated if the vendor offers a discount if you were to renew without eProcurement. What would you do?

Let’s assume that your vendor offered you a renewal and agreed to reduce your pricing by 10% and hold that pricing for a year and left all the other terms the same. That’s a pretty good offer, right? Maybe. If they offered that in a non-competitive environment, then I’d bet that they have additional margin beyond the 10%. The reason I believe this is because we see this scenario play out time and again with our clients. The client tells the vendor that they are going to host an RFQ and the vendor says there is no need and offers better pricing to avoid the process. Our average savings are well over 24%. Before making a decision to accept the vendor’s offer, it makes sense to talk through what savings levels SafeSourcing expects in a particular category.

It would be very easy to renew and stay with your incumbent vendor. However, knowing that you might be overpaying by 10% or more should give you pause. We always recommend that we discuss the category details and consider whether an RFQ is the right choice to help you make this decision. We usually recommend running the RFQ after that discussion. Either way, our services are always risk free, so there is very little to lose. So, what would you do? Would you use the available eProcurement tools and negotiate the agreement fully?

We’re here to help you make the choice that’s best for you and your company. Let’s talk before you agree to a renewal.

For more information, please contact SafeSourcing.  

 

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