Many times, new associates seem to be able to cut through the chaff and get to the heart of an issue. In this case a new account manager by the name of Dave Wenig joined us two weeks ago and recently took a stab at this blog post. His first thought was to title it ?Why Not?? This author agrees totally. Thanks Dave.

All you ever hear about a business is that they need to increase profitability. After all, that’s the whole point. One of the most common ways that a company plans to reach this goal is to reduce costs. Why then, wouldn’t a company be willing to try new techniques to attain that very goal?

There are many possible answers to that question. One common ?reason? not to try new ways of cost-cutting, such as a reverse auction, is that companies don’t want to upset their suppliers. But this is not reasonable concern. It is a very safe assumption that those same suppliers have similar business goals. They too are busy reducing their costs. If this is true, then each time they find success, their long-term customers become high margin customers. The fact is that the relationship with your incumbent will be more balanced if you choose to award them your continued business after e-negotiation.

Another typical ?reason? not to use e-negotiation tools is the assumed cost. Sure, all providers will have some type of fee structure. The simple answer is to shop your business around. Compare apples to apples from the different providers in the marketplace. See who is offering the largest and safest source of new suppliers. Check what the cost of running reverse auctions will be. Ask how these providers will assist you with product specifications and other hosted services. Judge the total value, then weigh your findings against the estimated savings that you were shown based on historical data. Then, you will feel comfortable integrating e-negotiation, like the services provided by SafeSourcing, into your own process.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments

If Retailers really want there buildings including offices, stores, warehouses and distribution centers to be green, it will not be easy. However the payoff in consumer confidence and long term energy savings may be well worth it

Te first step in driving green building practices is to commit to it as part of an overall corporate green strategy. This means more than initiating a plan to change the type of light bulbs one uses or monitoring refrigeration.

Once your company has embraced a green strategy as part of its CSR initiatives, it is then incumbent upon you to also hold your suppliers accountable to the same standards. It is much easier to achieve LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for your projects when the suppliers you use such as developers, landscapers and property management companies are LEED educated and certified and following the same type of initiatives that you do.

LEED certification which is managed by the U.S. Green Building Council or USGBC provides independent, third-party verification that a building project meets the highest green building and performance measures. Sustainable building strategies should be considered early in the development cycle. An integrated project team will include the major stakeholders of the project such as the developer/owner, architect, engineer, landscape architect, contractor, and asset and property management staff. Implementing an integrated, systems-oriented approach to green project design, development and operations can yield synergies and improve the overall performance of a building.

USGBC’s education programs are proactively changing in response to transformations to the LEED® Rating Systems, LEED-Online and LEED certification that comprise the new LEED v3 – as well as to changes in the Green Building Certification Institute’s (GBCI) LEED credentialing program.

It may not be easy being green, but this author thinks it’s the right thing for you to do.

We look forward to an appreciate your comments.

If Retailers really want there buildings including offices, stores, warehouses and distribution centers to be green, it will not be easy. However the payoff in consumer confidence and long term energy savings may be well worth it

Te first step in driving green building practices is to commit to it as part of an overall corporate green strategy. This means more than initiating a plan to change the type of light bulbs one uses or monitoring refrigeration.

Once your company has embraced a green strategy as part of its CSR initiatives, it is then incumbent upon you to also hold your suppliers accountable to the same standards. It is much easier to achieve LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for your projects when the suppliers you use such as developers, landscapers and property management companies are LEED educated and certified and following the same type of initiatives that you do.

LEED certification which is managed by the U.S. Green Building Council or USGBC provides independent, third-party verification that a building project meets the highest green building and performance measures. Sustainable building strategies should be considered early in the development cycle. An integrated project team will include the major stakeholders of the project such as the developer/owner, architect, engineer, landscape architect, contractor, and asset and property management staff. Implementing an integrated, systems-oriented approach to green project design, development and operations can yield synergies and improve the overall performance of a building.

USGBC?s education programs are proactively changing in response to transformations to the LEED® Rating Systems, LEED-Online and LEED certification that comprise the new LEED v3 ? as well as to changes in the Green Building Certification Institute?s (GBCI) LEED credentialing program.

It may not be easy being green, but this author thinks it?s the right thing for you to do.

We look forward to an appreciate your comments.

Many companies actually shy away from this process because they don?t believe they are large enough or have a staff knowledgeable enough to manage the process.

So, if you want some of the benefits (cost) associated with this process, there is a great opportunity for you to save on your logistics costs by using Third Party Logistics Providers or 3PL?s

The first step to accomplishing this process is to make sure you are working with a quality e-procurement solutions provider that should already have relationships in place with agents and other companies that can manage much of this process for you. This can allow you to compete with larger companies that have been sourcing lower cost products from these regions for years. Third party logistics professionals can prove very helpful in tracking down shipments when they did not arrive at the expected time or place, as well as tracking them en route.

The National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America www.ncbfaa.org can put you in touch with customs brokers and freight forwarders who can help you import your goods. Many of them offer informational websites that contain what is required in order to find the right customs broker or freight forwarder for your shipments. Your e-procurement solutions provider can also manage this process with the 3PL?s for you.

Companies can also visit the following website www.aapa-ports.org (American Association of Port Authorities) for assistance with the technical aspects of the logistics industry including directories of custom brokers and freight forwarders.

We appreciate and look forward to your comments.

Well in this case rubber tree plant is just a play on words for plastics and trees. We did get your attention though didn’t we?

According to Sustainablebusiness.com the residents of city of Seattle, Washington have voted down a 20-cent fee for paper and plastic bags, according to an Associated Press story that said about half of the mail-in votes had been counted late Tuesday night. The AP reported 58% against the fee and 42% for it. The city had previously approved the 20-cent fee for bags distributed by supermarkets, drug stores and convenience stores.

The question this raises is what consumers are saying about green initiatives sponsored by their government or business when they have a direct impact on their own pocketbook.

We are all well aware of the negative impact that deforestation has on our planet and that a paper bags do come from trees. We also understand the issues associated with the lack of biodegradability of plastic products and the landfill issue that creates. Retailers however have stepped up by providing good quality reusable bags at a reasonable cost. Suppliers have begun to step up by including bags with a higher percentage of recycled and biodegradable materials.

What the consumer in Seattle seems to be saying here is that this is the retailers problem rather than our collective problem. What the Seattle consumer also seems to understand is that the cost of doing business (buying bags) is already figured in the price they pay for products today.
It will be interesting to watch how this issue evolves city by city and state by state over the next couple of years.

What should procurement professionals tasked with purchasing these products do when regardless of their personal beliefs they are still required to buy these products?

Everyone knows an ant can?t climb a rubber tree plant.

High Hopes.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

A successful e-negotiation strategy over the long term is a growing high quality global supplier database.

This author believes that if you have a limited source of new suppliers, then including new blood every time you run a new event will be incredibly difficult. Resultantly your process by default ends up as just a new way to continue to award business to the same suppliers. This process may yield some productivity increases initially, but over time meaningful price compression will be difficult if not impossible.

Although the numbers quoted vary slightly by solution provider at somewhere between six and ten as to the number of suppliers required to drive optimum e-negotiation results, these data suggest that attaining sustainable results from the e-negotiation process has a direct correlation to the number of new suppliers available and willing to participate.

Let?s assume that your existing solutions provider has only a limited source of new suppliers. As an example, they can only find six suppliers to invite to an e-negotiation event. Your customer services team using their best sales skills can probably convince most if not all of these suppliers to participate. This may be fine the first time around. Although this author believes there are better sustainability strategy even given this scenario.

In the future, the suppliers that finished first or second or incumbents that were displaced may agree to participate again, but with a smaller number of suppliers and no new blood it will make the rerun of this auction less successful.

Lacking a robust source of new suppliers, and in the above case we only had a total of six available how can companies create a sustainable process.

The lack of a robust global supplier database limits future price compression at a minimum. It may also have a negative impact on quality, process and service. Particularly if history suggests a minimum of six to ten suppliers in order to drive optimum results…

Make sure to ask your e-negotiation solutions provider how many suppliers they have in their supplier database and if you can have regular access, it will determine your future success.

We appreciate and look forward to your comments

Make sure you understand all of the terms associated with off shore sourcing before you jump in. Sourcing products from off shore markets requires careful consideration of literally dozens of shipping terms and conditions.

As companies grow, the allure of sourcing lower cost products from off shore markets looks attractive. Mistakes in understanding the complex import/expert terms and conditions can cost you money, time or both.

Many safeguards are in place to insure that unnecessary damages do not occur to the local markets or workforces as a result of product imports.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) permits two forms of multilateral safeguards: (a) a country’s right to impose temporary import controls or other trade restrictions to prevent commercial injury to domestic industry, and (b) the corresponding right of exporters not to be deprived arbitrarily of access to markets. Article XIX of the GATT permits a country whose domestic industries or workers are adversely affected by increased imports to withdraw or modify concessions the country had earlier granted, to impose, for a limited period, new import restrictions if the country can establish that a product is “being imported in such increased quantities as to cause or threaten serious injury to domestic producers,” and to keep such restrictions in effect for a such time as may be necessary to prevent or remedy such injury.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

If you watch golf, go to football games, soccer games, play miniature golf, play tennis or even just go to the park on the weekend to walk your pet the use of artificial turf contuse to grow.

There are any numbers of companies that sell artificial turf and there are many businesses and consumers that buy it. In Arizona, we see it a lot on backyard putting greens and in some cases back yards period made from the product. At this authors home we never installed any in as our best friend Riley told us it got to hot for him to sit on and was not fun to do other things on as well. So we went for the real deal. As an environmentally conscious consumer and citizen, we probably use a lot more water as a result which is a real problem in Arizona.

Relative to those communities, school districts and other organizations that purchase these types of product, there was an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times on August 15th by Marc Fisher titled ?AstroTurf will get the lead out?. This author has posted on this subject before and would encourage you to read the article which went on to say that the manufacturer settled an environmental lawsuit with the State of California over lead used to keep the artificial turf green. AstroTurf and other turf-makers insist their product is safe in California.

Please remember that due diligence is required in the sourcing of all products. Accurate product specifications are just the starting point. Ask you solutions provider if they can assist you in developing these specifications or if they have any on file that you can review.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

The primary reason is that they have something to say. Some may say it better than others. Some may want to show how smart they are. The best posts however come from those few that really care and are passionate about the subject matter they choose to post about.

This author tends to think of the large Supply Chain blog sphere we are part of as a round table discussion that everyone can attend whenever they want to at no cost. That’s free education for those that choose to use it. The good news is that the more individuals that post on a subject the more exposure the subject matter gets and the greater the opportunity for an ?Oh My Moment? to occur. Quite often, blogs are subsets of a broader subject area. By example, the broad subject area of “Supply Chain” might include posts that cover any of the following areas.

1. Supply Chain Management
2. Warehouse Management
3. Procurement
4. Logistics
5. Manufacturing
6. Global Trade
7. Software Providers
8. Vendor Management
9. Supplier Management
10. Value Chain
11. Inventory Management
12. Distribution
13. Demand Planning
14. Materials Management
15. Raw Materials

Obviously, each of the above subsets of the broader subject of Supply Chain also has many potential subsets that can also be posted about. What normally happens is that an author chooses to post about areas that they are passionate about. For this author some but certainly not all of those areas might include.

1. Environmental Best Practices
2. Product Safety and Standards
3. Supply Chain Traceability
4. Food safety and Food Borne Illnesses
5. e- Negotiation
6. Supplier Data Availability
7. Procurement Professional Collaboration Points
8. Procurement Content Access
9. Corporate Social Responsibility
10. Retail Procurement
11. Profit improvement through Improved Procurement Practices

This author?s passion also leads to offering the following free products for procurement professionals on our website.

1. SourceBook? – A Procurement Professionals Social Community
2. A Daily Sourcing Blog
3. A Sourcing Wiki
4. Daily Safety Alert links
5. Product Specification Template Library
6. SafeSourceIt? Global Supplier Database and Query Tool

At SafeSourcing we also offer for sale best in class on demand hosted e-negotiation tools and related services while also averaging 5 posts per week for the last 15 months. At Safesourcing we are passionate about the supply chain and respect all those that share our passion.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments

It?s know surprise to anyone reading this post that retail supply chain jobs have never been the most glamorous or sought after jobs. As such access to sources of accurate information is criticle. The SafeSourcing Wiki is just such a source.

The reality is that even though these jobs lack glamour, they are some of the most complex and at times tedious of jobs. To often the research associated with these jobs is left to interns, new hires, internal transferees and other folks that quite frankly would like to make their mark and move on rather than continue to research supply chain issues and what seems as strange terminology. So, where do these associates turn for that inforamtion?

One place would be on line information such as a wiki. The obvious next question is just what is a WIKI? And, why the need for the SafeSourcing Wiki?

According to the king of all wikis, Wikipedia; a wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. For example, the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in businesses to provide affordable and effective intranets and for knowledge management. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.

“Wiki? is a reduplication of “wiki”, a Hawaiian word for “fast”. It has been suggested that “wiki” means “What I Know Is”.

So, what is a SafeSourcing Wiki? Since SafeSourcing is a company dedicated to retail e-procurement that is safety in the supply chain and to environmental consciousness, it makes sense that the SafeSourcing Wiki would be a specialized wiki ( in this case retail e-procurement) that concentrates at a minimum on any or all of the following.

1. Retail procurement terms and links.
2. Safety standards and definitions and links.
3. Environmental certifications and definitions and links.
4. Educational content for procurement and supply chain professionals.
5. Procurement templates for commonly sourced products and services.

The nice thing about wikis is that the definitions are not static. Authorized users can add to definitions or add definitions and terms as well as rate the site. In this way a body of work can grow from the contribution of all users and help to provide a reliable source of data for professionals in a specialized field.

Please feel free to visit the safesourcing wiki regularly and offer your comments, terms, definitions and suggestions. This section of the SafeSourcing website is free tool, and it is for your use as a procurement and supply chain professional, the most difficult job in retail.

We appreciate and look forward to your opinions.