Archive for July, 2021

If you are not sourcing your services with eProcurement tools you are missing the boat!

Monday, July 26th, 2021

 

Today’s post is by Ron Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing

Professional services represent one of the fastest growing procurement areas for thousands of companies. The reason for this growth includes reductions in staff, efficiencies through outsourcing non-core competencies such as IT, and cost reductions for service on demand versus full time internal resources.

SafeSourcing has completed hundreds of professional services sourcing events resulting in the following overall statistics:

Number of Service Providers Invited:  5 to 9
Average Suppliers Participating:  6
Project Timeframe:  < 30 Days
Average Savings:  24%

Here is a list of 25 of the more popular services sourced using our eprocurement tools!

1. Employee Automobile Reimbursement Plan
2. Accounts Payable Recovery
3. Event Planning Services by Location
4. Armored Cars Services
5. Audio Conferencing
6. B2B Payment Solutions
7. Background Screening Services
8. Customer Satisfaction Program Provider
9. Customer Satisfaction Program Provider
10. Customer Statement
11. Disaster Response (Emergency Cleanup)
12. Event Services
13. Facilities Asset Management
14. Temp Labor
15. Jet Charters
16. Legal Services
17. Managed Print Services
18. Payroll Services
19. Recycling
20.Waste Management Services
21.Lawn Care Services
22.Snow Removal Services
23.Environmental Services
24.Construction Services (General Contractor)
25.Logistics

If you’d like to learn more about how to reduce your current costs for services or get a savings estimate on a specific services category, please reach out to a SafeSourcing Customer Services Associate.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

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Here’s how to ensure your services sourcing projects results Up Front!

Friday, July 23rd, 2021

 

Todays post is by Ron Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc.

Awards of business, contracts and statements of work are all important after a services event has taken place. However, if you want to ensure the savings associated with your new services contract make sure you identify or reference a structured change of control process in your terms and conditions.

Change happens. It can result from poorly designed specifications, terms and conditions, quoting instructions and other data related to a bid. The normal process for managing these changes is a change of control process which governs how any changes to the services being provided as identified in the actual bid.

The change of control is normally managed as a request that communicates the requested changes to the services deliverables. Normally the change request will describe the following at a minimum.

  1. The change
  2. The reason for the change
  3. The effect the change may have on the existing Statement of Work.
  4. Impact on cost or savings

In most cases a project manager or the associate with responsibility for managing the program deliverables will be required to submit a written change request to the contracted or warded supplier.  The supplier will then develop and return the response to the contracting company.

The contracted supplier and the contracting company will then review the proposed change request and either approve it, modify it, or reject it. When approved the contracting company as well as the contracted supplier must sign the change request to authorize the work as well as the implementation of the work and its potential impact on the existing project plan or project timeline.

If you do not want erosion in your savings, make sure you spend the time to cover this process in your bid parameters.

In order to learn more, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Services Associate. Be sure to ask them about our Risk Free Trail Program

 

 

 

 

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Procurement As A Service (PaaS)

Thursday, July 22nd, 2021

 

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

In the past, we’ve talked repeatedly about how SafeSourcing delivers our services in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. As a refresher, here is a post from 2014 that details our SaaS software suite. We also often talk about how we treat our SaaS offering as full-service and have done so for a long, long time. Here’s another quick read from 2017 talking about our full-service approach. The way we combine our tools with our expertise and the way we actually deliver the services to achieve our customers’ goals have pretty well always been what you might describe as procurement as a service (PaaS).

I mention this because it seems to me that I am hearing more and more about PaaS recently as if that is a new or emerging trend and it surprises me greatly. SafeSourcing has always operated as an extension of our customers’ own procurement capabilities in order to allow them to outsource much or all of their needs to us. We’re comfortable delivering against this model and we rarely operate outside of it.

The entire procurement process can be managed by SafeSourcing beginning with spend analysis. In all reality, the process never really ends because procurement is truly cyclical. There are other buzzwords as well and just like with PaaS, there will be a marketing campaign that will rise to the occasion. As a term like PaaS gains momentum, more and more companies will roll out their offering. While there isn’t anything wrong with that, it can make it harder to identify which companies are actually experienced in delivering a PaaS offering.

Anyone interested in offloading more of their procurement function should be careful to find a partner that can truly take on the load in a SaaS model. Many lack the expertise needed in their services teams to truly deliver on the wide variety of categories that need to be addressed. SafeSourcing has this expertise and delivers strongly in the as a service model. To be effective you really need a partner that has the people, the intellectual property, and the software to drive savings in an efficient outsourced model.

Procurement as a service isn’t a new concept and we like to think we’ve been doing this all along. Personally, I would be leery about choosing any provider that talks about PaaS like it’s a new concept. 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.

 

 

 

 

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Warehouse Prices Spurred by Demand

Tuesday, July 20th, 2021

 

Today’s blog is by Gayl Southard, Vice President of Administration at SafeSourcing.

Due to the surging e-commerce purchasing, warehouse distribution centers are jockeying for limited space.  Competition is driving up industrial rents as retailers and logistics providers look to get goods closer to the consumers, resulting in bidding wars in coveted locations.  Businesses are looking to get their goods to consumers as quickly as possible.  “Demand for industrial real estate is so strong that taking rents — the initial base base rent agreed on by a landlord and tenant — are rising faster than rents, according to real-estate firm CBRE Group Inc.  Industrial taking rents were up 9.7% in the first five months of 2021 compared with the same period last year, while industrial asking rents rose 7.1% according to CBRE, which tracks 58 U.S. markets.”1

Logistics space, close to cities and ports, and for big-box warehouses like those used in online fulfillment operations, prices are rapidly increasing.  In Northern New Jersey, first-year base rents  jumped by a third year-over-year through May, while Southern California’s Inland Empire rose 24.1%, according to CBRE.  It is creating a similar situation as the housing market, where the demand is greater than the market.  The pandemic lockdown and store closures have pushed retailers into online marketing.  E-Commerce will account for 26% of all US sales by 2025.  Companies are also looking into keeping more inventory on hand in order to avoid shortages.  Goods need to reach consumers faster, as well as cut down on the transportation costs.  The amount of available industrial land for new warehouses near urban centers fell over the past decade.  This adds to the pressure on supply of warehouses for larger buildings with higher ceilings and adequate parking that will accommodate e-commerce fulfillment centers.   In turn, this will push more development out to secondary markets.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can help your procurement efforts, or on our Risk

Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.  We have an entire team ready to assist you today.

References………………………………..

Jennifer Smith, WSJ, 6/23/2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sourcing Team​

Friday, July 16th, 2021

 

 

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

Wherever you spend majority of your time and effort, whether it is at home, school, or work, there are prevailing themes that you may notice. The biggest and arguably the most necessary is teamwork. Within a family, teamwork could mean a number of things, from sharing in the chores and housework, chipping in on bills and expenses, or simply working together to make things interesting and fun. Schools often use teamwork, not only in sports, but also through collaborative classwork or group projects. This type of teamwork is an important learned skill because it will ultimately affect every person later in life, especially at work.

Work environments rely heavily on teamwork in different, yet equally important, ways. Teamwork allows employers to play to the strengths of their team. For instance, if one person is great at organizing and finding files, they may help other employees filing tasks so they can focus on work that align with their strengths. In addition to utilizing stronger areas, employees can share workload when a task becomes more daunting. For instance, if a project suddenly becomes more complex than initially thought, others on the team can help to either get the larger task done or work on the smaller tasks, allowing for more focus on the larger tasks.

Whichever way your business team supports each other and finds success, there is another way to utilize teamwork and that is through a procurement partner, like SafeSourcing. SafeSourcing can help your team and assist in their procurement efforts or take them on entirely so your team can focus on what they do best. Procurement partners can help find the vendors you need, services you need, or the supplies you need and often at rates lower than expected.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can help your procurement efforts, or on our Risk

Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.  We have an entire team ready to assist you today.

 

 

 

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A simple supplier scoring system may provide key performance indicators for the future.

Thursday, July 15th, 2021

 

Todays post is by Ron Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc.

Having a large international supplier database to drive sustainable results in e-procurement events such as ant e-RFX function is critical to that events success. Maybe even more critical is making sure that the suppliers once selected for participation in an event are of the highest quality, professional, responsive and have your best interests at heart. There are several areas in the early strategy stages of a  an e-RFX process which if properly monitored can be leading key performance indicators as to future performance. These KPI’s are; the initial supplier response and supplier training schedule adherence. If suppliers are not interested enough during these early stages, this may be an indicator of future performance in other more critical areas such as on time delivery, back order management, documentation and audit compliance.

A reasonable process for measuring these KPI’s would be to measure the number of days between the project start date or initial supplier contact and the event start date, where the supplier has been sent an invitation but has not responded either positively, negatively or given a reason  for their response. Maintaining an active status of response dates could be scored based on the number of days it takes invited suppliers to respond. The longer it takes a invitee to respond the lower KPI score that supplier would receive.  Another possible KPI measurement or filter once the invitation has been accepted would be the number of days between the date accepted and the event start date, where the supplier has accepted an invitation but has not completed their automated training.

These are not intended to be punitive measures. In most cases suppliers will perform beyond your expectations. Sustainability and quality require measurements regardless of how simple.

If you’d like to learn more about The SafeSourceIt™ Supplier Database, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services account manager.

We appreciate and look forward to your comments.

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“To Make Change in Some Different Way”

Wednesday, July 14th, 2021

 

Today’s post is from our Archives at SafeSourcing, Inc.

With the advent of every new management tool comes a painfully predictable wave of human resistance. The reasons people resist new tools and processes are as varied as the number of humans that have been asked to change.  Some employees strongly resist change because the effects are unpredictable.  Other peers view changes in their quality processes as risky and they fight it only on principle. It’s almost natural that people wait for others to embrace change before they accept anything new.  When late adopters don’t embrace change, the resulting lack of shared vision and inconsistent implementation confuses and eventually kills any change effort.  As wide-ranging as the reasons are for resisting change, the various forms of reluctance share one common trait.  The people fighting change are rational. This is true when it comes to procurement,  meaning the art of buying goods and services.  Over the years, procurement pros have become responsible for larger budgets and interestingly from both 10 years ago and today not much has changed with some aspects of the procurement process.  Then, as now, procurement professionals say their biggest challenges are having accurate forecasts and having to do more with fewer people. More automation or use of technology can only help improve the profession.

SafeSourcing eProcurement tools, in particular the reverse auction process, is a fairly new way to increase your bottom line utilizing SafeSourcing Inc’s full service offerings to enhance the spend process.  Using new technologies as described will put additional profit dollars directly on your bottom line where the savings are traditionally 10X your investment utilizing eProcurement tools.  You’re just accepting a different way to facilitate the bids/pricing process many times with your incumbent vendors.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can help in your procurement efforts, or on our Risk Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative. We have an entire team ready to assist you today.

 

 

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Creating our own limitations.

Tuesday, July 13th, 2021

 

 

Todays post is from our SafeSourcing Archives.

Opportunities to learn are everywhere but can be used either to improve or damage your capabilities. For example, any married couple knows it’s not easy to have two flawed individuals share life together. However, even in less than ideal situations, there are opportunities to learn that you will never get anywhere else other than a situation where someone’s soul is borne to you in ways neither individual can hide from. There will be opportunities to learn how others think and operate, and to discover your own biases and shortcomings. However, there will also be opportunities to hide your insecurities, deny your flaws, blame shift, and stubbornly hold fast to your own LIMITATIONS. This is typically what people do when meeting viewpoints different from their own: We get defensive, myopic, and squander an opportunity to better ourselves.

Whether we like it or not, character traits like humility, and work ethic, will profoundly influence how well we perform our professional activities. No one promoted this fact more heavily than the author of. The 7 habits of highly effective people.

Stephen Covey proposed that maturity is a continuum from least to most mature by the steps of Dependence (reliance on others), to Independence (reliance on self), to Interdependence (Independently chosen reliance on others, to accomplish cooperatively what we cannot independently). This is counterintuitive because we typically think of Independence as being the most mature, in the form of the lone wolf leader, or the maverick who does things his/her way. But the truth is it’s far more difficult and beneficial to assume someone else might know something you don’t. By definition, this means you have to let other people make decisions out of their unique perspective and expertise that you WOULD NOT, or else you’ll always be LIMITED by your own understanding, and no organization will ever be all it can be without utilizing the collective expertise of the group.

Are your limits strictly determined by how hard you work? How fearless you are? How smart you are? What if you’re limiting yourself by making assumptions about how much value other individuals or organizations can contribute to your business? Do we have the strength of character to admit there are individuals or organizations that can perform certain tasks better than we can? Leaning on other’s expertise isn’t an insult to your capabilities; it’s a means of interdependent improvement.

There are variables in our lives we genuinely can’t control, and we shouldn’t want to, especially when it comes to learning through how we work and relate with other people. If we truly want to extend beyond our current limits, we have to allow external factors to force us to explore outside of our current paradigms, and deliberately chose to EXPAND, not LIMIT, our understanding through it.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can assist your team with this process or on our Risk Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative. We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

We look forward to your comments.

 

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Balance the power in your negotiations

Friday, July 9th, 2021

 

 

Today’s re-post is by Dave Wenig, Sr. VP of Sales and Services at  SafeSourcing.

Dave considers how best to navigate a purchasing decision when external factors are the key drivers.

There are times when a purchaser may feel as though the balance of power in a negotiation is stacked in favor of the seller and factors such as limited sources of supply or external factors are strongly influencing the decision.

Let’s revisit a situation that retailers were facing a couple of years ago!

Retailers had been navigating through the process of implementing EMV solutions and were expected to have completed this process by October of 2015 for their in-store POS terminals. EMV, which is short for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, is a standard for payment cards that is meant to be a more secure replacement than the magnetic stripe cards that we’re used to; although these chip cards do still have the magnetic stripes.

Their next deadline for EMV compliance was to affect the forecourt. For gas station retailers, the deadline to implement EMV capabilities at the pump was October 2017. After the deadline, the liability for fraudulent transactions will shift to the retailer if the retailer is not leveraging EMV. What this means for the retailer is that they are faced with a significant purchase with what seem to be limited options for implementation based on their existing equipment and other factors.

When faced with a decision such as this, it’s helpful to have a partner with the tools and experience to help guide you through the decision process. This is particularly important when your options seem limited or controlled by external factors like the EMV deadlines. Experience provides the confidence and the competence to develop and execute your commercial negotiation strategy. Your partner’s tools provide the capability and the leverage to balance the power in the negotiation.

In the case above, many companies contacted SafeSourcing for assistance.

At SafeSourcing we are devoted champions of saving money on just about any category that you can come up with. In fact we probably source it more often than your buyers or category managers do. All of our team member at SafeSourcing, would be excited to discuss how adding e-Procurement to your sourcing projects can improve your negotiation process. For more information, please contact a SafeSourcing representative.

We look forward to your comments.

 

 

 

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Effective Supplier Data Management Improves Procurement Process

Tuesday, July 6th, 2021

 

This may be old, eight (10) years in fact. Its still no less true today then it was then.

The following excerpt is from the above titled article.

There is more to an effective e-procurement program than cost reduction.

While buyers frequently record cost reductions in the range of 30% to 40% when utilizing an e-procurement or reverse auction process, the issues of quality and performance cannot be overlooked.

The foundation for successful e-procurement is the supplier database
that has been developed and is maintained by the e-procurement service provider. Significant time and capital investment goes into the development of an effective supplier database. It provides the buyer with a recognizable advantage in terms of classification of supplier capabilities, historical performance and the quality of the products provided.

The scope, accuracy and functionality of the supplier database are critical components for buyers when using e-procurement. These elements allow buyers to identify the best sources of supply quickly and cost-effectively, oftentimes uncovering alternative sources that were previously not even considered. This is one of the major advantages of including the services of an online reverse auction service provider like SafeSourcing in the procurement process.

Supplier data management is an excellent example of pairing technology advancements with intellectual property to produce an effective, economical support tool that benefits both suppliers and buyers – better pricing, better quality and better sources of supply.

Click here in order to view the entire article.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

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