According to Supply and Demand Chain Executive, Honoring the supply chain’s best and brightest, Supply & Demand Chain Executive’s “Pros to Know” include professionals proactively working to improve their business’s functions in a number of categories—including manufacturing and production output; procurement; logistics; risk mitigation strategies; sourcing; financial operations; packaging and distribution; transportation; and much more.

Now in its 13th year, the Supply & Demand Chain Executive “Pros to Know” awards recognize both ends of the supply chain. This includes honoring the “providers,” which includes individuals from software firms, service providers, consultancies or academia who helped their supply chain clients or the supply chain community prepare to meet industry challenges. This also includes honoring the “practitioners,” e.g., those supply chain executives who demonstrated leadership by managing risk in the supply chain; provided competitive advantage; and delivered value to the bottom line.

SafeSourcing winners include the following.

1. Ronald D. Southard, Chief Executive Officer
2. Mark  A. Davis, Sr. Vice President and COO
3. Deborah H. Wilcox, Vice President of Marketing and Professional Services
4. Ryan J. Melowic,  Assistant Vice President  Procurement Center Of Expertise

We are very proud of our team’s award winners for 2013 and endeavor every day to provide the type of service our customers deserve that results in such awards.

To speak with one of our pros please contact a SafeSourcing customer services account manager.

According to Supply and Demand Chain Executive, Honoring the supply chain?s best and brightest, Supply & Demand Chain Executive?s ?Pros to Know? include professionals proactively working to improve their business?s functions in a number of categories?including manufacturing and production output; procurement; logistics; risk mitigation strategies; sourcing; financial operations; packaging and distribution; transportation; and much more.

Now in its 13th year, the Supply & Demand Chain Executive ?Pros to Know? awards recognize both ends of the supply chain. This includes honoring the ?providers,? which includes individuals from software firms, service providers, consultancies or academia who helped their supply chain clients or the supply chain community prepare to meet industry challenges. This also includes honoring the ?practitioners,? e.g., those supply chain executives who demonstrated leadership by managing risk in the supply chain; provided competitive advantage; and delivered value to the bottom line.

SafeSourcing winners include the following.

1. Ronald D. Southard, Chief Executive Officer
2. Mark? A. Davis, Sr. Vice President and COO
3. Deborah H. Wilcox, Vice President of Marketing and Professional Services
4. Ryan J. Melowic,? Assistant Vice President? Procurement Center Of Expertise

We are very proud of our team?s award winners for 2013 and endeavor every day to provide the type of service our customers deserve that results in such awards.

To speak with one of our pros please contact a SafeSourcing customer services account manager.

Please enjoy today?s guest post from Michael Figueroa and account manager at SafeSourcing.

If you live in the USA, you are probably accustomed to having an extremely high level of autonomy in how you shape your daily existence with the choices you make. Our entire culture has great emphasis on freedom, and not just in the areas of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Peripherally, we sometimes grandfather this concept into the areas of freedom to choose user experiences, social networks, flavors, styles, displays, and information inputs. Living in the information age has left us more options to choose from than we often know what to do with. There is so much information available in fact, that Google, Microsoft and others, some of the biggest companies in the world, afford their existence off of our need for someone to help us aggregate our information.

There are many opinions about what will come after the information age, though a common theme around most of them is prioritization, organization, and clean-up.? Theories about this ?clean-up age? revolve around the recognition that our extreme availability of choices can have high costs for those who haven?t been given the tools to manage it. We have no shortage of problems or information about them, but have not necessarily been taught the logic skills to understand, given the algorithms to sort and identify, or focused on the vision necessary to prioritize.

This overflow of options and lack of direction creates a situation in which we have high opportunity cost. When we only have one choice, we don?t have the opportunity to be disappointed with our choice because there was no better alternative. But sometimes we make decisions and realize after the fact that there was a better alternative. Sometimes the array of options is so huge and complex it is overwhelming, and the decision making process itself is costly, especially when decisions are made out of exasperation instead of deliberation. The more opportunities we have, the greater potential we have to achieve satisfaction, and conversely, the most potential to feel unsatisfied with the choices we make after the fact.

Some of the major considerations we make at SafeSourcing when analyzing purchasing data are;

??What are the client?s objectives

??What are the common denominators

??What is the baseline

This allows us to provide information in a format that is relevant to the project, establish commonalities for side by side comparison, and understand where that takes us in comparison to our starting point. The result is changing information from being paralyzing, to information that is actionable. We take the costly array of choices you have from being dangerously unknown, to understandable for what sourcing choices can be Safe.

To learn more about sourcing safer products and services please contact a SafeSourcing customer services account manager.

This post is from Ronald D. Southard CEO at SafeSourcing.

I have posted a number of times over the last five years on the supposed benefits of Offshoring, Nearshoring and now Reshoring or Backshoring. I?ve even taken a look at the environmental impact of offshore tonnage being shipped via ocean bound freight and the resulting impact to our collective carbon footprint from that freight and the diesel they use. Interestingly, it is greater than the damage from all of the emissions of all the cars in the U.S. combined. I have even discussed the creative use of containers that were no longer being used at one point because of the cost to reship them. In fact some of them have become creative housing projects while others were just melted down.

I like detail, and I?m not sure if we looked at all related costs of offshoring in the first place would have made as much sense if in retrospect we had all of the information available to us today (Big? Data; UH!).

So now? companies are pursuing reshoring or backshoring because the cost of producing products? in places like the Asia Pacific region are going up substantially as the emerging middle classes in those areas are demanding better wages, benefits and work conditions.

I was reading a survey? in the USA TODAY MONEY section attributed to? Schneider Associates that indicated that the statement ?Made in USA? being the most influential attribute when buying a new product had increase from 48% to 62% during the period of 2008 to 2012. That?s a 29% increase in 4 years. And, it indicates that almost 2/3 of the respondents agree. That is a big number as companies try to increase their wallet share from their top decile customers. Quite frankly, we do not have companies ask us very often any more if we can bring in suppliers from off shore to participate in eRFX events for products and raw materials. This can only mean that these companies are in fact reading their tea leaves (customer data) and doing as their customers ask. The answer is BUY AMERICAN! And that should include Mexico and Canada which after all are part of America and benefit with the U.S.? from our NAFTA arrangement.

If you?d like to learn more about how SafeSourcing can help you find sources of supply in North America that you may not be aware of, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services representative or visit our SafeSourceIt? Supplier data base query tool.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Today?s rant is from Ronald D.? Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing

I?ve been reading a lot lately about the fact that overall cost reduction is dead and that maintaining cost or cost containment is where companies should be focused. The logic behind this conclusion is that many of the indictors of the potential for savings such as inflation, crop availability and demand that drives current pricing models will never be what they were in recent history. While I review this data on a daily basis and the premise for the argument has merit, over all I don?t buy it and if I did I would not be as passionate about what it is that we do for a living at SafeSourcing.

The reason I disagree, is that so many companies do not or have not used the type of advanced eProcurement tools that are available to them today in order to compress current pricing. While many best in class procurement practitioners that use the most current generation of eProcurement tools may have squeezed or compressed pricing within their supply chain, the fact is that many have not. Additionally, many of these companies have not renegotiated their contracts for years in order to take advantage of the prices that may have been available to them. Although there supplier may claim to have shrinking margins, the question that needs to be asked of the supplier is what is my margin to you compared to other customers that you service. Another issue that flies in the face of this opinion is that there are suppliers out there that may want a company?s business and as such are willing to take at a lower margin with the hope of growing their wallet share with this customer over time. The fact is if you don?t ask or have never asked, you will never know.

I have always believed that it is possible to improve earnings dramatically though the use of modern eProcurement tools that continue to regress in price as a result of advanced technologies. In the retail segment I have posted examples that show how companies can improve earnings by greater than 50% by just focusing on 20% of their total cost of goods. This process will improve gross margins and net earnings. The issue that is not generally discussed is how to prove this.

The simple fact is that the P&L from a company?s prior year never quite looks like the P&L from the current year, as companies continue to evolve their programs for customer acquisition and growth. Examples could be new marketing programs, branding initiatives, new formats, new product strategies and mix as well as a host of other initiatives. Unfortunately, these programs are not always tightly linked throughout an organization so that what a procurement department is focused on directly reflects itself in a side by side P&L comparison year over year. An example of this might be special board driven capital programs for millions of dollars that negatively impacts earnings, when the procurement department can demonstrate in a very real way that they took millions of dollars out of the cost of goods resulting in direct cost reductions. If the capital program which was board approved is 3 times the size of the savings generated by cost reduction, guess what earnings will look like if revenue did not grow dramatically. The answer is negative earnings. The fact is that the procurement department may have exceeded their plan for the year and in fact been paid their annual bonus. But, because the entire organizations goals and alignment are not tightly linked the savings get lost in the data. Unfortunately this is not an uncommon issue.

I have not even discussed the expense area in this post.

If you?d like to learn how to address this issue within your organization, please contact a SafeSourcing customer?s services representative.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

SafeSourcing is very pleased with the growth it has generated for 2012 and looks forward to continued growth during 2013. By providing our customers tools to improve their profitability through procurement best practices with our entire SafeSourceIt? SaaS cloud based Procure to Pay product portfolio.

Despite the continuing economic condition SafeSourcing Inc. reported significant 2012 revenue growth of 23.2 % versus the prior year of 2011.Net earnings for the same period improved 93%. SafeSourcing also released several new products and services during 2012. Most significantly amongst these were SafePO? and SafeCatalog?.? Continued growth of its customer base and utilization of its entire products suite by existing customers added to the highlights of an extremely successful 2012.

According to Ron Southard SafeSourcing CEO, We continue to honor the commitment we made to our customers by addressing all spends regardless of size for all companies regardless of size. During 2012 we have sourced products for companies across multiple industries for fortune 100 companies and companies with much smaller footprints.? SafeSourcing has run hundreds of millions of dollars through our system during 2012 for all eRFX types while also providing new sources of supply, a focus on companies CSR inititives and significant savings across all categories. Southard continued by saying that they could not be more pleased with the faith that their customers have placed in SafeSourcing during a continuing difficult economic climate.

To learn more about SafeSourcing please visit our website www.safesourcing.com.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

SafeSourcing is very pleased with the growth it has generated for 2012 and looks forward to continued growth during 2013. By providing our customers tools to improve their profitability through procurement best practices with our entire SafeSourceIt™ SaaS cloud based Procure to Pay product portfolio.

Despite the continuing economic condition SafeSourcing Inc. reported significant 2012 revenue growth of 23.2 % versus the prior year of 2011.Net earnings for the same period improved 93%. SafeSourcing also released several new products and services during 2012. Most significantly amongst these were SafePO™ and SafeCatalog™.  Continued growth of its customer base and utilization of its entire products suite by existing customers added to the highlights of an extremely successful 2012.

According to Ron Southard SafeSourcing CEO, We continue to honor the commitment we made to our customers by addressing all spends regardless of size for all companies regardless of size. During 2012 we have sourced products for companies across multiple industries for fortune 100 companies and companies with much smaller footprints.  SafeSourcing has run hundreds of millions of dollars through our system during 2012 for all eRFX types while also providing new sources of supply, a focus on companies CSR inititives and significant savings across all categories. Southard continued by saying that they could not be more pleased with the faith that their customers have placed in SafeSourcing during a continuing difficult economic climate.

To learn more about SafeSourcing please visit our website www.safesourcing.com.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Today?s post is from Sarah Kouse a SafeSourcing Center of Expertise Account Manager

For practically forever the U.S. Postal Service has been in service delivering mail to businesses and residents six days a week all over the country. I always remember as a child getting very excited to go check the mail to see what arrived that day. Most of the time it was bills and/or advertising mailers for my parents, but on occasion I would receive a letter in the mail and it would feel like Christmas and bring me excitement to reveal what was inside.

The U.S. Postal Service has decided to discontinue Saturday?s for mail delivery, but continue to delivery packages to businesses and residents. Doing this, they are able to save about $2 billion. They plan to make this cut in August 2013.

Could they have chosen other actions of saving money and cutting costs without completely cutting out a service that patrons have been used to receiving for decades? Could they have looked at ways at cutting their spending on necessary items they purchase to run their business?

Cutting cost by downsizing is not always the only answer. That?s where SafeSourcing can help you and your business. SafeSourcing can look into ways to help you cut cost without downsizing or changing how you run your business. We can look at items that are purchased on a regular basis, that are necessary to run your business, and look at alternative options at purchasing those items significantly cheaper and still retaining that same quality of the product and/or service.

Contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative for more details on how we can save you money.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments