Archive for August, 2023

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Watch your commodity markets very closely!

Wednesday, August 30th, 2023

 

Today’s post is by Ronald D. Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc

In an article by Bryan Doherty in Successful Farming titled EXPECT TIGHTER SUPPLY OF CATTLE IN 2023, ANALYST SAYS. Though cattle marketing numbers were heavier than expected late summer and fall, expect that beef production and the number of cattle marketed will be lower in the year ahead.

Why? The quick answer: higher input costs and drought conditions in key cattle-producing states will mean less inventory in the months ahead.

How do you make sure you are sourcing your commodity needs correctly? Contact SafeSourcing Inc. We buy it more often than you do and know the levers to pull. Glad to share some recent examples when you reach out.

SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay SaaS based provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions and associated white glove services that are part of our SaaS offered SafeSourceIt™ eSourcing suite. These include but are not limited to SafeContract™, SafePO™, SafeDocument™ and our SafeSourceIt™ Global Supplier Database that includes over 557,000 vendor/suppliers.

For more information, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Services Associate.

References:

Successful Farming: Bryan Doherty

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High-Low Pricing Strategy

Friday, August 25th, 2023

 

Today’s post is by Ronald D. Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc.

According to Wikipedia, high-low pricing (or hi-low pricing) is a type of pricing strategy adopted by companies, usually small and medium sized retail firms. It is a type of pricing where a firm charges a high price for an item and later will sell it to customers by giving discounts or through clearance sales. The basic type of customers for the firms adopting high-low price will not have a clear idea about what a product‘s price would typically be or must have a strong belief that “discount sales = low price” or they must have strong preference in purchasing the products sold in this type or by this certain firm.

There are many big firms using this type of pricing strategy (ex: Reebok, Nike, Adidas). The way competition prevails in the shoe industry is through high-low price. Also, high-low pricing is extensively used in the fashion industry by companies (ex: Macy’s, Nordstrom…).  This pricing strategy is not only in the shoe industry but also in many other industries. But, in these industries one or two firms will not provide discounts and works on fixed rate of earnings those firms will follow everyday low-price strategy in order to compete in the market.

If you’d like to learn more about how SafeSourcing can assist in properly analyzing the total cost of your annual purchases, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate.

Sourced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-low_pricing 

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Have you invested in EGGCoins yet? 

Thursday, August 24th, 2023

 

Today’s post is by Ronald D. Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc

EGGcoins or just plain old farm fresh eggs are outperforming Bitcoin and most other crypto assets.

However, you cannot hold them for quite as long because they spoil quickly, or even worse they hatch and turn into ChickenCoins that require physical housing versus a virtual wallet.

While bitcoin is up 38.92% YTD. Eggs are up over 60% in the last 12 months and headed higher yet. Maybe you can exchange EGGcoin with Bitcoin.  At least if the price drops sharply, you’d have something to eat. Or even have a pet (not suggested as my grandfather was a chicken farmer so I know things).

While I know you all like tongue in cheek posts, please remember that like everything, egg prices vary drastically based on type, size, color, and farming styles like free range versus caged.

If you really want to get your best price for this commodity, Contact SafeSourcing Inc. We buy more of all commodities more often than you do and know the levers to pull. Glad to share some recent examples when you reach out.

SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay SaaS based provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions and associated white glove services that are part of our SaaS offered SafeSourceIt™ eSourcing suite. These include but are not limited to SafeContract™, SafePO™, SafeDocument™ and our SafeSourceIt™ Global Supplier Database that includes over 557,000 vendor/suppliers.

For more information, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Services Associate.

 

 

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Are you sourcing a new category or cannot find a specification for a current category?

Monday, August 21st, 2023

 

Today’s post is by Ronald D. Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc

Often when speaking with customers and prospects I am asked why SafeSourcing can reduce their current pricing as dramatically as we do.  My fist response to ask how often they source the category. The answers range from annually to every few years or longer. From there I ask them how they keep track of industry changes and evolution. This normally draws a blank look. My answer to them is that categories that they source even annually are evolving every day. Just think about waste removal the transition to a circular economy. What you might source for service today may not be the same as what is available six months from now, and at what cost SafeSourcing may source those categories dozens of times in a year and all of those changes are kept in our The SafeSourceIt™ Event Templates Library and are up to date to the present day. Often these templates are more complete than data the customers have on file.

Our SafeSourceIt™ Event Templates Library is available to customers of SafeSourcing Inc. This library is designed to shorten the process of procuring a variety of not for resale and for resale products by making SafeSourcing’ s best practices tools available to our customers to shorten the amount of work one must do to prepare for quality e-procurement events. For more information or a demonstration of this tool please contact marketing@safesourcing.com.

SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay SaaS based provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions and associated white glove services that are part of our SaaS offered SafeSourceIt™ eSourcing suite. These include but are not limited to SafeContract™, SafePO™, SafeDocument™ and our SafeSourceIt™ Global Supplier Database that includes over 557,000 vendor/suppliers.

To learn more, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate.

 

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Category Captain

Friday, August 18th, 2023

 

Today’s post is by Ronald D. Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc.

Does your company have a Category Captain (Subject Matter Expert) for all of your spend areas?

Within a category, a category captain is the manufacturer‘s representative responsible for analyzing the product movement, assortment, inventory management, promotion, buying, and profitability for a specific geographic area or an entire chain. They will be expected to have the closest and most regular contact with the retailer. In order to do the job effectively, the supplier may be granted access to a greater wealth of data-sharing.

At SafeSourcing we offer SaaS based eprocurement solutions, as part of our SafeSourceIt™ family of products. Each product is backed by white-glove services with battle tested statements of work.

If you lack specific product knowledge or only source  certain categories less than annually, and would like to understand current market drivers,, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate.

 

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Social Media Influence

Wednesday, August 16th, 2023

 

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

We all know how social media has impacted our social lives, but how is it affecting other areas of your life?

As many other people do when we get a little bit of down time, I sometimes scroll through the popular social media sites for a little bit of a distraction and entertainment. Something I have recently noticed, though, is the shifting content within those platforms. It shouldn’t surprise me to learn how much money is being spent on marketing and advertising on the platforms I go to reconnect with friends, yet I am still surprised at the trends. It seems that more and more content rarely makes its way to me, yet I see advertisement after advertisement for things deemed to be in my interest based on algorithms and history. In fact, it often makes me less inclined to use those platforms because I get tired of the endless advertising.

Just like television, newspapers, and magazines, marketing seems to have taken up permanent residence in all the electronic and digital platforms, but this time likely at a price I suspect might be no small number. So how do you get your company or organization out there and get some recognition and potential new business? For many organizations, they simply cannot compete with larger companies and cannot foot the bill for the type of social media advertising that really makes an impact.

This is how working with a procurement partner can help. Whether you are selling goods or buying goods, a procurement partner, like SafeSourcing, can help connect you with other organizations that are also looking to buy or sell goods or services. A partner like this can help connect you using RFQ tools that provide the right companies, products, and services together for everyone’s gain.

Contacting a procurement partner could be the right way to go if you have found that the high cost of advertising and declining overall opinion of those platforms are not the way your organization would like to go.

For more information on what the SafeSourcing team can offer you, 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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Doubles, Home Runs and Grand Slams for our Retail Partners!   

Tuesday, August 15th, 2023

 

Today’s post is from our repository at SafeSourcing Inc.

2023 has been a Grand Slam for SafeSourcing’s retailer clients and the trend is continuing! While vendors continue to push out price increases to retailers leading to rising costs, they are also reporting ever increasing profits. For those who have had enough of that, read on for some examples.

SafeSourcing’s retail customers have seen incredible success. Ongoing market challenges including inflation and vendor capacity constraints have been mitigated or disproven using eRFQ events.

A few Retail RFQ Highlights

  • Waste removal: 32%
  • Cooler Glides and Shelves: 34%
  • Hot Dogs: 17%
  • Cigarette Racks: 27%
  • Bagged Ice: 7%
  • Deli Containers: 14%
  • Coffee, Cappuccino and Hot Chocolate: 41%
  • Bottled Water: 31%
  • Labels: 31%
  • Plastic Cutlery: 41%
  • Windshield Washer Fluid: 18%
  • Concrete and  Pump Cleaner: 19%

 This is possible for you as well and it is possible right now. Connected with us to learn more about these examples and to talk about how to get started.

SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay SaaS based provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions and associated white glove services that are part of our SaaS offered SafeSourceIt™ eSourcing suite. These include but are not limited to SafeContract™, SafePO™, SafeDocument™ and our SafeSourceIt™ Global Supplier Database that includes over 557,000 vendor/suppliers.

For more information, please contact SafeSourcing.

 

 

 

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Business to Business Associates are finding it hard to connect via phone calls!?

Friday, August 11th, 2023

 

Today’s repost is by Troy Lowe; Vice President of Development at SafeSourcing.

Recently I was listening to some news on the television and heard a report that said Gen Z and Millennial office workers want to ban phone calls because they are too aggressive and confrontational.  After doing some research I found that there was a study done and that instead of phone calls 75 percent of office workers surveyed say they would prefer to use email or social media to communicate.  The one statistic from the survey that concerned me the most was that over 75 percent of the people admitted to frequently ignoring incoming phone calls if they did not recognize who was calling because they were afraid that it could be a confrontational conversation.  This I could understand when it comes to your personal phone but not your office phone.  So according to these statistics you may have about a 25 percent chance of getting ahold of someone when making calls to businesses whose employees are primarily under the age of forty.  I will admit some things can be taken care of by text or email, but this is usually only simple questions that do not have a lot of follow up questions.  In my opinion to be successful you need to be able to communicate to potential customers and business partners by phone and in person to ensure that everyone is on the same page.  Oh, and by the way the study also stated about ten percent of the people surveyed admitted that they will go out of their way to avoid face to face contact.

Interested in learning how SafeSourcing can help your company save money during these challenging times?  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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Logistics Category Managers and Buyers. There are savings available out there today.

Thursday, August 10th, 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s post is by Ronald D. Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc

How is your transportation and logistics category performing during these challenging times? Hopefully not like the above image. This area of your business requires very careful planning and a very clean product and services specifications. SafeSourcing keeps this type of clean information on file for you in our SafeSourceIt™ products and services templates library.

Here are some logistics and transportation categories that we have sourced that have been achieving decent results during the last six months.

  1. Fleet Repair and Maintenance
  2. Trailer Dollies
  3. Tractor Rentals/Purchases
  4. Fuel Carriers
  5. Tractor Leases
  6. Class Eight Truck Tires
  7. Sprinters
  8. Temporary Labor Drivers
  9. Managed Fleet Services
  10. Pallet Programs
  11. Truck Wash Programs
  12. Freight Lines/Shipping Lanes
  13. Yard Tractors
  14. Fleet Titling and Registrations Services
  15. Truck Decaling
  16. Refrigerated Freight
  17. Truck Batteries
  18. Shipping Supplies
  19. 18-Wheeler or Semi-Truck Tires
  20. Roadside Service
  21. Transportation Lanes

SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay SaaS based provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions and associated white glove services that are part of our SaaS offered SafeSourceIt™ eSourcing suite. These include but are not limited to SafeContract™, SafePO™, SafeDocument™ and our SafeSourceIt™ Global Supplier Database that includes over 557,000 vendor/suppliers. To learn more, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate.

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A Category Management Primer!

Wednesday, August 9th, 2023

 

 

Today’s post is by Ronald D. Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc.

What is the structure of your buying organization?

Evolution to a category management structure began in the 1980’s. Many companies today have still not completely evolved to this structure. So, what are some of the elements of a category management structure and what do they do. Here are some definitions from the SafeSourcing Wiki which is free for anyone to use.

  1. CategoryManagement is a retailing concept in which the total range of products sold by a retailer is broken down into discrete groups of similar or related products; these groups are known as product Examples of grocery categories may be tinned fish, washing detergent, toothpastes, etc. Each category is then run like a “mini business” (Business Unit) in its own right, with its own set of turnover and/or profitability targets and strategies.
  2. A categorymanager (CM) analyzes product brands and mix, inventory levels, movement, shelf space allocation, promotions, buying, and profitability of a merchandise category. They manage the marketing for a range of related products in a way designed to increase sales of all of the products, as opposed to a brand manager who markets an entire brand of goods.
  3. Within a category, a category captain is the manufacturer‘s representative responsible for analyzing the productmovement, assortment, inventory management, promotion, buying, and profitability for a specific geographic area or an entire chain. They will be expected to have the closest and most regular contact with the retail In order to do the job effectively, the supplier may be granted access to a greater wealth of data-sharing.

If you would like to learn more about our daily posts or other SafeSourcing free tools like our SafeSourcing Wiki, please contact a SafeSourcing customers services associate.

 

 

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