Today’s post is from our SafeSourcing Inc. Archives

What does it take to make a candy cane, package it, market it, and distribution? All of these involve procurement. Today, the candy cane makes up a significant amount of the $1.4 billion Christmas candy market. In fact, billions of candy canes are made and consumed each year.

First the history of the candy cane: from the HomeBoy Media Network!

The candy cane is a Christmas tradition that many hold dear but nobody really knows why. Let’s face it, the only things we really know about candy canes is that they taste good and that they are red and white.

Whether the story of the candy cane is a legend or if it is true is not certain, but this is how the story goes: About two hundred-thirty years ago at the Cologne Cathedral in Germany, the children that went to church there were really loud and noisy. They often moved around and would not pay attention to the choirmaster.

This was especially difficult for the choirmaster when they were supposed to be sitting still for the long living Nativity ceremony. So to keep the children quiet, he gave them a long, white, sugar candy stick. He couldn’t give them chocolate or anything like that because the people at that church would think it was sacrilegious. So he gave them the stick and he bent it on the end to look like a cane. It was meant to look like a shepherd’s cane, and so it reminded the children of the shepherds at Jesus’ birth.

In 1847, a German-Swedish immigrant in Wooster, Ohio put candy canes on his Christmas tree and soon others were doing the same. Sometime around 1900 candy canes came to look more like what we know them as today with the red stripes and peppermint flavoring.

Some people say the white color represents the purity of Jesus Christ and the red stripes are for the wounds he suffered. They also sometimes say that the peppermint flavoring represents the hyssop herb used for purifying and spoken of in the Bible. The shape also looks like the letter “J” for Jesus, not just a shepherd’s cane. It is possible that these things were added for religious symbols, but there is no evidence that is true.

Around 1920, a man in Georgia named Bob McCormack wanted to make candy canes for his family and friends. He later started mass-producing candy canes for his own business which he named Bob’s Candies. This is where many of our candy canes come from today.

Tomorrow we will discuss the raw materials needed to make candy canes.

For more information on how we can help you with your procurement needs 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.

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

I wrote this post a number of years ago, and it is still true today. To many CEO’s believe they can have a huge impact in the sales area. Let’s rebrand and we can drive huge top line sales increases! BS. Yup BS. Many have tried and many have failed.

What they should be saying is let’s  MAKE MONEY. We are in business to MAKE MONEY. We can increase sales by focusing on sales. News flash, visit your stores  and  talk to your customers. Watch you associates. It will be come painfully clear what will improve sales.  You do not need to spend millions to rebrand. We can also keep more of those sales increases and reduce historical margins by focusing on reducing costs.

Read on if you want to learn something. Or go find an investor and delay the asset sale for a few more years.

I would  still be glad to personally discuss this premise with any Retail CEO or CFO that wants to challenge it! Let me do it for you. You’ll be surprised and be a hero and get a big bonus.

Let’s review exactly what a reverse auction is, how simple they are to use and the potential financial benefits?

Reverse auctions are web based  or Software as a Service (SaaS) tools that let retailers and other companies find the best suppliers for any resale or not for resale product or service they wish to source.  Using a web based reverse auction tool, retailers, other business or even large holding companies can locate and invite many more suppliers to take place in reverse auctions than they could possibly find or manage using traditional sourcing methodologies or even tools like BING or Google. During the reverse auction they can review on one screen all of the responses from suppliers, data about the suppliers, notes from the suppliers, product specifications and other necessary information in an instant. Upon auction conclusion which is typically less than 30 minutes including extensions host companies can review potential savings scenarios and award business right from their desktop. Sound simple? That’s because it is.

Now let’s get to the simple financial benefits. Let’s assume a $150M smaller Retail Company with industry average earnings of one percent or $1.5M. Additionally cost of goods for this company is 70 percent or $105M. Let’s also assume this company were to only source ten percent of their for resale goods spend or roughly $11M. With well below industry average savings of just ten percent, total savings generated would be $1.1M which is a direct impact to net profitability. If all other segments of the P&L perform to plan and all savings are recovered during the same business calendar year net profitability would increase to $2.6M or a 73% improvement.  Again this assume no tributes to Caesar or other funny accounting associated with new capital plans and the like

So, why don’t many companies use reverse auctions and other e-procurement tools? That’s a great question! Maybe someone out there has an answer.

If this author were you, I just could not ignore this type of opportunity.

If you’d like some examples of the types of savings SafeSourcing can generate for you by size of spend and category, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services account manager.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

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

Category discovery is the basis of any quality implementation of an e-negotiation strategy. It is essential that this process be supported by the company’s executive management because they hold the key to unlocking access to data sources across the enterprise. This process will include working with all category managers, buyers, other procurement knowledge workers and anyone that participates in sourcing to uncover what you don’t know in support of your Requests for Information (RFI), Proposals (RFP) and Quotations (RFQ).

The first step in this process is the understanding of where the data is hiding and in most companies large and small it is. Here’s a list to get you started. Data discovery generally comes from two sources; Internal and external.

Examples of Internal and External Data Sources

1. SLRP
2. Budgets
3. General Ledger
4. Detailed P&L
5. Purchase Orders
6. Contracts
7. Detailed Vendor Listing
8. Product List by Vendor
9. Invoices
10. Product cut sheets
11. Copies of orders
12. Brochures
13. Supplier Websites
14. Annual Reports

While all of these data sets have been around for years, you may also have an ERP system, Data Warehouse, spend cubes for either or any number of new AI tools related to these systems. The old saying goes, garbage in, garbage out! The question is do you trust your data?

If you’d like some help with your category discovery and have a General Ledger you’d like analyzed, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Services Project Manager.

As always we look forward to and appreciate your comments

Todays post is from Ron Southard CEO at SafeSourcing

Unfortunately some 70% of companies still do not use eprocurement tools. If they did, their results would be better. SafeSourcing can give you customer references that exceed the 17X ROI mentioned above. So what happens when you combine your spend with another company?

Generally speaking, the greater the spend amount, the more interest you will get from potential vendors. As a result, many of our customers have been turning to collaborative eProcurement events in order to benefit from the additional savings that higher volumes can generate. Let’s take a look at a few of the benefits of getting involved.

1. Higher savings due to aggregate volumes
2. Improved payment terms
3. Larger vendor pool
4. Greater ROI
5. Source smaller category spends

Based on the five benefits listed above, perhaps it’s time to try a collaborative event. You may ask; “how would we become involved?” The answer is simple. Contact your SafeSourcing customer services representative and ask if there are any open or upcoming opportunities in which you could participate. Similarly, if you have any upcoming projects either large or small, ask your partner to attempt collaboration within their customer base.

Here’s an example of savings generated from a recent collaboration. In this scenario, our customer was in need of a relatively small spot buy for replenishment purposes. Their spend in this category was actually quite low and was actually the lowest overall amongst the participating companies. In this example, the customer saved almost 37%. I find it difficult to imagine that they would have done so well without the eProcurement process. Further, this is evidence of the benefits of the collaborative process as their pricing was likely much better off as a result of the aggregated spend.

So, are you ready to get involved, or will you continue to stand on the sidelines?

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.