Archive for the ‘Supply Chain Procurement’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Buyers; Do you need a great place to research product quality and recall issues?

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of injury or death from thousands of types of consumer products under the agency’s jurisdiction. The CPSC is committed to protecting consumers and families from products that pose a fire, electrical, chemical, or mechanical hazard or can injure children. The CPSC’s work to ensure the safety of consumer products – such as toys, cribs, power tools, cigarette lighters, and household chemicals – contributed significantly to the 30 percent decline in the rate of deaths and injuries associated with consumer products over the past 30 years.

 Recalls and Product Safety News can be found at the CPSC’s website and can be searched using a number of categories, dates and other criteria such as those below.

1. Recall Number
2. Company
3. Product Type
4. Product Description
5. Hazard
6. Country/Administrative Area of Manufacture
7. Recall Date
8. UPC

You don’t always have to buy something in order to get your job done. Sometimes just knowing where to find the information can be the hardest part of your job. Now you have one fewer places to look.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Posted in , , ,

Rain, Wheat and Pasta!

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

For weeks, North Dakota and Montana, the nation’s two largest producers of durum wheat have been pounded with heavy rain that will likely mean a drop of up to 47% of durum wheat production. 

Durum wheat, or “macaroni wheat”, is the hardest of all wheat types and that together with its high protein and gluten content make it the perfect wheat to be used in the manufacturing of pasta.

Due to the heavy rains farmers have been unable to get crops planted and even now they are out of time to plant crops in time to avoid the pre-winter frosts and will likely have a little more than half of the durum wheat production as normal, affecting prices of related products all over the world.
Durum wheat was up over 52% in May and the May U.S. pasta prices were the most expensive on record while other durum wheat producers like Canada saw prices jump 47% in May.  With fewer acres of wheat being produced the pasta prices will be affected accordingly.

Companies producing pasta products like Kraft with their Macaroni and Cheese and Campbells with products ranging from noodle-based soups to Spaghettios, have already announced increases in many of their products due to the lack of durum wheat production and subsequent higher durum wheat prices.

In product categories such as this one it is more important than ever to make sure that you are doing everything you can to keep the cost of goods controlled with tighter contracts containing index terminology and keeping the pricing you receive as competitive as possible. 

When the supply of product takes a huge decrease in relation to its demand, the opportunity for competitive pricing events becomes a little more difficult, as vendors will have plenty of places to sell their product. 

This may be a time to get more creative in other ways as far as length of contracts, other services or products you may agree to take on, or other considerations that will allow you to get competitive pricing on a high demand product category.  It is hard to predict what climatic conditions such as all of the spring rain will do  to agricultural products, but smart procurement professionals can learn to leverage other techniques in order to keep their costs for products affected by these conditions under control.

For more information on SafeSourcing and how we can assist your company with sourcing these goods and services, please contact a Customer Service Representative for more information.

We hope you have enjoyed last week’s  Five Part Series and look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Posted in , , ,

If you treat suppliers fairly and openly they will continue to participate in your strategic sourcing events.

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

We regularly conduct surveys as part of our SOP when we have completed an online e-RFX. These surveys are pivotal to ensuring that participants in our customer?s events were treated fairly. What our suppliers have told us makes events successful for them and would encourage them to participate again even if they did not happen to be the low bidder in a particular event is that this is an educational process for their company and ultimately becomes a way to do old things in a new way. To a company our suppliers encourage the following. Openly communicate with all suppliers and make sure they understand everything and are completely comfortable with specifications, terms and conditions, quoting instructions etc. Take the time to be complete even if they have participated in the past. Make sure they have no questions.
?
Here is a sample list of questions that should be considered when inviting or encouraging suppliers as? participants.

1.?Does the supplier understand that there is no cost to them to participate?
2.?Do they understand they will be trained at know charge?
3.?Do they understand event timing and requirements?
4.?Does the supplier understand the terms being used and how they apply to a strategic sourcing event such as?
a.?Current Price
b.?Reserve Price
c.?Index Price
d.?Mixed price evaluation
e.?Low Quote
f.?Low quote indicator
g.?Last entry indicator
h.?Funds
i.?Terms
j.?Notes
k.?Extensions
l.?Matching quotes
m.?Event? rules
n.?Product specifications
o.?Samples
p.?Award of business

At the heart of it, this is common sense. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Unfortunately many companies don?t always follow this practice and as such, it negatively impacts the sustainability of their strategic sourcing program.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Posted in , , , ,

It’s 2011; do you know where your supplier data comes from?

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

Data models incorporated into effective e-procurement supplier data management programs should be extremely complex. This is why they are much more than a simple online directory. In fact, properly designed high quality supplier databases should be able to provide much of the data you might find in the opening pages of a detailed Request for Information or RFI.

A simple query of this data such as, “show me all companies within a 500 mile radius of the home office zip code that provide this defined set of products and that meet the following safety certifications”, should produce an accurate, verified list of supplier options that benefit the buyer and streamline the procurement process. Additional queries are typically used to summarize additional information related to defining the potential suppliers identified. Providing a list of attributes such as business description, sales volume, years in business, corporate officers, product performance ranges, etc. is the logical next step. The drill down through available information continues from here as the results provided become more refined with each query. As you can recognize, effective supplier data management involves the retrieval of valuable information from a data source that includes a substantial number of records and classifies the results according to the parameters defined.

Where does your data come from and how often do you choose a new source of supply provided by this data.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Posted in , ,

Knowing the Organizations Helping to Protect Us – Part 2 of 4

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

In Monday’s blog we talked about how many organizations are out there working very hard to make sure that the world and its inhabitants are safer.
In the rest of this week’s posts we would like to take some time and highlight a few of the groups that work so hard to protect us, groups you may or may not been familiar with but that deserve the attention and praise of the business world.

The Gluten Free Certification Organization (GFCO) “provides an independent service to supervise gluten-free food production according to a consistent, defined, science-based standard that is confirmed by field inspections, in order to achieve heightened consumer confidence and safety. “ (www.gfco.org)

Gluten-free diets are very common for treating diseases of the intestine, connective tissues, and other sensitivities and allergies of the protein, gluten.  The GFCO works with auditors to certify that are manufactured to the guidelines to ensure a product is gluten-free and safe for those with the ailments above.  Working with manufactures such as Snyder’s and retailers such as Trader Joes, the GFCO works hard to improve the products consumed by those on gluten-free diets.

For more information on the certified Gluten-Free go to our website or for a list of Certified Gluten-Free products go to the GFCO’s site at http://www.gfco.org/products.php

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Posted in , ,

Why procurement and supply chain professionals need e-procurement tools more than ever.

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

Procurement and other supply chain professionals have developed and nurtured existing relationships within their incumbent suppliers for years and in some cases decades. Too often, this has led to incumbent suppliers becoming to comfortable. The feeling of entitlement begins to creep in and some suppliers feel as though their business will be renewed annually. Too often this is true.

This author has often said that the job of buyers, category managers, procurement executives and other supply chain knowledge workers is the most difficult job in all of retail and retail distribution. These professionals are literally swamped. Quality, safety, environmental issues coupled with the enormous amount of new product offerings is overwhelming. Just conducting the basic research required to identify potential new sources of supply, finding the correct contact information as well as determining if the company has the capability to meet your needs. All of this is before you even sample, price or test new offerings. No wonder it is so easy to just stay the current course. This however would be a mistake.

A general rule of thumb that this author has always ascribed to is if you are doing business with a current supplier for more than three years and are only negotiating with that supplier, your prices are probably too high. The question is how can you find out?

That is where e-procurement tools come in to play. I won’t advertise here, but if you were to Google e-procurement or reverse auctions etc. any number of companies will come up. Or if you were smart, you just click this link and have measurable savings in less than 30 days and often faster. Visit SafeSourcing.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Posted in , , , , , , ,

What impact will the Hours-of-Service (HOS) Proposed Rulemaking have on transportation costs?

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

In December of 2010 the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration or FMSCA a part of the U.S. Department of Transportation proposed changes to the hours of service for Commercial Motor Vehicle Drivers (CMV) with comments due by March 4th of 2011.

These rules are an example of a good thing and potentially a bad thing for companies that ship or receive overland freight as part of their business. In general when drivers are required to work less hours, more drivers will be required to transport products and more trucks will be required to support the increased driver population. So, more jobs and increased sales of CMV?s; is probably good for the economy. The off side of this conversation is an increase in shipping costs in an industry that has seen prices climb steadily over the last few years that result in reducing their customer?s profit margins.

All companies will need to keep abreast of these potential rule changes, because this author is sure that these expenses were not planned for in anyone?s budgets.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Posted in , ,

Social Media for the Supply Chain?

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

We don’t think so, because there already is one with a lot of members.

It’s called Sourcebook. Welcome to Sourcebook the procurement industries first professional social network. Enter your profile, choose an avatar, participate or lead threaded conversations with your peers.

We appreciate your comments.

Posted in ,

Trying to make sense of product traceability!

Monday, February 28th, 2011

The definition of traceability according to Wikipedia refers to the completeness of the information about every step in a process chain. Traceability is the ability to verify the history, location, or application of an item by means of documented recorded identification.

When we hear organizations like the FDA use the above term what they are referring to is the capability of bidirectional traceability or tracing products one step back one step forward. This means identifying the immediate supplier of the product and identifying the immediate recipient of the product, which is not the answer we need.
 
However the process also requires some level of common sense. I’m a man of faith, but blind faith really gets us no where when we are talking about food product traceability. GS1 has created a certification for traceability in cooperation with a number of organizations such as FMI, CIES and BASF.

So from a common sense perspective one would believe that all products we consume are safe, that all produce and grain products are traced back to the seed level. Unfortunately this is not the case.

Let’s just examine milk products or byproducts. In a post from two years ago, this author discussed what is happening in China where 13,000 babies were hospitalized and over 53,000 babies affected and that it could happen in North America. As recently as last week we heard that this was happening again in China with another protein look alike other than melamine. We are talking over two year’s folks.

So what best practices does your company deploy to protect your customers and theirs?

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Posted in ,

The experts say that the price of everything is going up! Can NAFTA offer a clue as to how to control this?

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

As oil heads north of $100 per barrel again, the resulting higher fuel costs will again force global trade to focus on such as USA, Mexico and Canada versus the Asia Pacific region which is more than 7500 miles away.

Hopefully we learned our lesson less than three years ago? If so, we should all be aware of suppliers that will not require us to buy goods from so far away that transportation and logistics costs will kill our P&L.

Let?s remember that the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA allows us to not just near shore many of our purchases but to localize them. This reduces transportation expenses. North America is made up of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Although NAFTA is primarily focused on agricultural products traded between North American Country?s it also represents one of one of the most successful trade agreements in history and has contributed? significantly to increases in agricultural trade and investment between the United States, Canada and Mexico. There are plenty of opportunities in the regional low cost manufacturing bases could have a related regional impact on keeping? costs lower on many types of retail products.

Finding tools that can aide our search in finding new sources of supply is imperative as demand rises and causes strain on commodities. Are you aware that a tool like this already exists which can provide data at a glance on 928 general merchandise suppliers located in Mexico, 1,585 Grocery Suppliers located in Canada, and 1,940 Pharmaceutical suppliers located in the United States. If not, please visit the SafeSourceIt Query Tool to learn more. Your P&L will thank you and so will your customers when you don?t raise their prices.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Posted in , , ,

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
© 2025 SafeSourcing