Source Local

November 16th, 2021

With the rising problems with shipping......

 

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

With the rising problems with shipping, the global market, and product shortages, it may be time to take a look at what you can do to overcome your challenges and prosper.

With shipping rates up and packing supplies in high demand, if you can get something locally and avoid shipping altogether then you are in luck. You may be able to avoid shipping altogether. This may only work on small scale items but could be a fantastic opportunity with the upcoming holiday season.

With the global market being where it is now there may be a rise in local businesses. Businesses located nearby your home or office could mean shorter wait times for goods or services, which may in turn help you get back to business sooner. While local or small businesses can often cost more than big box stores, there is the benefit of investing your money and support to your community and helping it grow. This can work to not only keep products on your shelves, but also drive more business in the area you supported.

One other benefit to sourcing some of your goods and services locally is that you may find something you like and never expected. Often, some of the tastiest goodies or well-made items are hand-made and sourced locally. Having unique items that are well received can even bring more business in to your organization because of its uniqueness and originality.

Whether or not your organization has sourced locally, you may benefit from attaining the assistance of a procurement partner like SafeSourcing. We can help to find the products or services you need and maybe even find something you never knew you needed.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can help your procurement efforts, or on our Risk

Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative. We have an entire team ready to assist you today.

 

 

 

 

Vendor Training!

November 12th, 2021

How a New Event Participant (Actually even Prior Participants) Can Maximize the eRFX Experience

 

 

Today’s post is by Patrick Quinn, Procurement Specialist at SafeSourcing Inc.

Ensuring the consistency of any of your business activities is always top priority, and for SafeSourcing, that means making sure each of our events runs as smoothly as possible. In an eRFX event, many participants will be competing for the business of our clients, and that means that each of them must be focused on their pricing, and not on how to properly submit their quote with a ticking clock running.

In order to provide a consistent experience for our participating vendors, we invite each associate who plans on submitting quotes to attend a brief one-on-one training session with us. Our training will cover the basics of how to submit a quote as quickly and efficiently as possible, what each listed piece of information on the screen means, the rules and procedures of the event, and how to know if you have submitted the lowest price for an item. In addition, we’ll also allow time for questions on your end at the end of the training in case there’s something that we didn’t cover.

This may seem like a lot of hassle just to compete for a sale, but with twenty to thirty minutes of your time, you’ll be able to quickly jump into any event that we run in the future, and strategize with your sales team without having to worry about what each and every number on our interface means, and if it even applies to your bid at all. So, if you are a new vendor about to participate in your first eRFX event with us, give a call to schedule a brief training session!

For more information, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services specialist.

Are you having problems with your inventories?

November 10th, 2021

Should it be this difficult? Not Really!

 

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

What issues are you having with you inventory?

We hear a variety of issues/excuses every day of the week.

  1. Cannot get the items you want even if they are on order
  2. Cannot figure out acceptable substitutes for items you cannot get
  3. Cannot find a new or additional sources of supply to make up the difference.
  4. Stuck in a sole source environment.
  5. Not sure of what inventory you should commit to post pandemic.
  6. Not enough workers available to manage incoming inventory or returns.
  7. Do not want to tie up too much capital on potentially excess inventory.
  8. To many yet unknown supply chain issues to deal with!
  9. Not structured properly to decentralize inventory.
  10. No collaboration program with other companies that may have inventory to share.

I could add another ten issues right of the top of my head! Why? Because we hear it every single day from every single customer as well as every single supplier. Many retail customers do not have products to fill orders and many suppliers do not have product capacity to bid on new business.

There are creative ways to work around these situations. They may not fix all your issues, but they well may fix or solve many of them and keep customers from looking elsewhere.

Is it secret sauce you might ask? In some sense yes, because companies like SafeSourcing, a SaaS based sourcing platform for all categories know where alternative sources of supply are because we deal with more of them than you do on a regular basis. We also must produce temporary solutions for the current situation of which you may not think.

I am however not going to share any detail with you. If you think I addressed some of your issues, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services representative and we can talk. We might save your people invaluable time that can be used in other areas. If you would like to speak with me directly, Contact SafeSourcing and they will transfer the call.

Best of Luck!

Persistence is Key!

November 9th, 2021

The time-cost of finding savings.

 

Today’s post is from Patrick Quinn, Account Manager at SafeSourcing Inc.

As supply chain issues persist, many businesses have found it frustrating to find not just the best quotes from suppliers, but any competitive quotes at all. The sourcing process can be incredibly time consuming when seeking the right suppliers, and the very real possibility exists that at the end of the day, your new prospective supplier can only quote at a higher price than your current supplier is already providing. If that happens, your business must now decide between keeping your current supplier and starting the whole process over again to hopefully find a better price on the market. If your business goes through this enough times, eventually you’ll find a supplier that can save you money. But, this cost saving measure comes at the price of all the time you spent on suppliers, and not any other issues that your business might be facing.

This is a problem that rarely exists for SafeSourcing’s customers. Our eRFX events are filled with quality vendors competing for your business. The persistence that it takes to find a supplier that truly earns your business is a practiced skill that pays off huge for you during our events.

Each event is unique to us, and is given the same level of commitment as the last. Vendors are constantly researched, contacted, invited to our events, trained on our tools, and contacted again, all to find competitive quotes, no matter the market environment.

Patrick Quinn is a Procurement Specialist at SafeSourcing Inc. For more information, please contact SafeSourcing.

Egg Carton Labeling Terms

November 4th, 2021

The egg carton was invented in 1911 by newspaper editor Joseph Coyle .......

Today’s re-post is by Gayl Southard VP Administration at , SafeSourcing

The egg carton was invented in 1911 by newspaper editor Joseph Coyle of Smithers, British Columbia, to solve the debate between a local farmer and a hotel owner over the farmer’s eggs being delivered broken. Up until that time the eggs were delivered in egg baskets.  The egg carton, or “box” was refined by H. G. Bennett (Riseley UK) during the 1950’s and became the norm for egg transportation.

Some terms used in labeling eggs are as follows:

  1.  Antibiotic-Free. This term is misleading, as all eggs produced in the U.S. are antibiotic-free. If the hen becomes ill and antibiotics are needed, they are used on a therapeutic level under the supervision of a veterinarian. Hens given antibiotics at a high dose would be diverted from human consumption according to FDA regulations.
  2. Brown Eggs. Red-brown feathered breeds lay brown eggs. According to the USDA the nutritional content is the same as white eggs.
  3. Cage-Free/Free-Roaming Eggs. Eggs laid by these hens are indoor floor operations, sometimes referred to as free roaming. These hens may roam in a building, room to room, or in an open area, usually a barn or poultry house and have unlimited access to food and water. Some hens may even be allowed outside to forage for food. These hens have a shelter that protects them from predators.
  4. Enriched Colony. A production system that contains adequate perch space, dust bathing or a scratch area(s), and nest space to allow layers to exhibit inherent behavior. Enriched colony systems are American Humane Certified.
  5. Fertile Eggs. Eggs, if not refrigerated, can be incubated to hatch into chicks. These are eggs are a result of roosters and hens housed together.
  6. Free-Range Eggs. Eggs produced by hens that have access to outdoors. Hens have continuous access to food and water and may forage for wild plants and insects.
  7. Good Source of Protein. All eggs qualify for the nutrient content as they meet or exceed 10% of the DV (daily value).
  8. Gluten Free. All eggs are naturally gluten free. Any grains a chicken ingests is broken down during the digestive process and not passed through the body tissue.
  9. Hormones. The egg industry does not use hormones in the production of shell eggs. The FDA require that a qualifying statement “Hormones are not used in the production of shell eggs” to prevent misleading consumers that some eggs have added hormones.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can assist you or on our “Risk Free” trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Representative we have an entire team waiting to assist you today

Source: Egg Nutrition Center SafeSourcing has a lot of experience sourcing eggs and poultry. It is a category that is run regularly.

Meat, Cheese and Corn Markets

November 3rd, 2021

Not all costs are going up every day! Meat Prices Fall!

 

Todays post is taken from the SafeSourcing October News Letter written by Gayl M. Southard, VP Administration at SafeSourcing.

The COVID-19 pandemic sickened many meat packing workers earlier this spring which forced factories to shut down. Fast forward and the price for ground beef and pork loins have returned to pre-pandemic prices. The price for chicken wings and prime rib are cheaper than before the pandemic started. The rise in production and lower overall demand are pushing prices down.

Gordon Foods Service Inc., one of the largest U.S. restaurant distributors, is selling beef for half what it cost a few months ago. B&R Stores, Inc. restricted the amount of beef people could purchase in the spring but have recently put it on sale for a discount. The same factors that drove prices up in the springtime now are driving prices down. Plant shutdowns which hurt production in the spring have now led to a backlog of livestock. Slaughterhouse shutdowns in April and May that cut deeply into meat production, processing has resumed now. Tyson Foods Inc., the largest meat company by sales, reported an estimated one million cattle and three million hogs remain backed up on US food lots.

If you’d like more information as to how SafeSourcing can help you mitigate price increase, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services associate.

References

Jacob Bunge and Jaewon Kant, WSJ, 9/21/2020

As Services Expand So Do Sourcing Needs

October 27th, 2021

With a growing trend of retailers offering more services how are new products & needs being sourced?

Todays post is from our SafeSourcing Archives!

In today’s increasingly competitive landscape, retailers are getting more and more creative with the types of services they are offering their clients to get them into the stores. Dine-in space that offers music, internet access or scheduled events such as wine-tasting are becoming more popular every year as retailers compete for the customer’s time, attention and money.

With so many of these services being implemented quickly and by the individual stores, at least initially, the opportunity to consolidate and organize the entire spend for the company presents a very big and potentially profitable opportunity.

One growing service retailers are offering is in-store internet access. Customer internet is a service that can easily be sourced for the entire company either through one national vendor, or a handful of regional vendors. Leveraging the purchasing power of all of the company’s locations for internet services can be a highly successful process as there are so many more providers today than there were even 5 years ago.

The music played in these new areas is also another service that can be sourced as there are many suppliers that can either supply music that can be played and sold at the point of purchase creating yet another new revenue stream or that provide internet streamed music complete with customized marketing messaging in between songs.

Another way for retailers to successfully reduce their spends by purchasing for the whole company is with the supplies being used for their coffee or dining services. In many cases these new areas are not treated as their own profit centers and the materials needed to run them are purchased on a store by store, as needed basis. Napkins, utensils, cups, condiments as well as all of the ingredients that go into the finished product are examples of items that could be taken to the vendor community for more competitive pricing.

So many of these new ideas for bringing customers are highly affective and are difference makers for someone shopping at one location over another and by bringing the services and products they offer under solid sourcing practices they can also be highly profitable new channels of revenue for the company.

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 look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Sourcing Project Fingerprints

October 26th, 2021

In preparation for your next sourcing project, have you ever thought about what your sourcing fingerprints look like?

 

Todays post is from our SafeSourcing Archives.

The day we are born we all get a set of identifying marks that make us unique; our fingerprints. Not one us have the same set of fingerprints and so they have become one of the things that identify who we are to the rest of the world.

In much the same way our physical fingerprints identify us, how we approach and handle tasks in our everyday lives have characteristics similar to our fingerprints that identify us as the ones involved with those tasks; how we write; how we speak; how we lead; how we organize; how we communicate. Each of us puts fingerprints on our work that identify us as being involved with a project. Let’s look at a few areas to help you determine what fingerprints you are leaving behind.

Research: Every sourcing project begins with the research. Research includes understanding what you are buying, how much you are buying, who you are currently buying that product from and who else sells that product that you could buy it from. The diligence you show in digging up the documents, emails, contracts, potential new vendors leaves your fingerprint on a project a major way.

Tool use: Tools range from pencil & paper to Excel spreadsheets to fullblown eSourcing solutions that intelligently help you organize the procurement process. Knowing what tools you have at your disposal and how to use them can mark a project with your involvement. Also, knowing when the tools you have aren’t sufficient is equally important.

Organization: Knowing all of the details does no good unless the organization of a project is done well. Great procurement professionals can assess a project; determine who needs to be involved; determine what each phase of the project should be and who should be brought in to assist with each step of the process. Knowing what to expect and organizing appropriately can be the difference between a successful project and one that fails to meet expectations.

Communication: Communication is tightly connected with organization. Without effective communication among all parties involved in the organized project, including what the expectations of each member are, many projects fail before they ever begin.

Desire: The wild card to the fingerprint you leave on a project is desire. Desire can originate from many different sources but the goal is always the same; completing a successful project in the time it was expected to happen. Among each of the five components mentioned here, desire will mark projects as yours and will many times be the difference-maker in a project being completed correctly and in a timely manner. When you strongly care about a project being successful, the majority of the time it will be.

For more information on SafeSourcing or how you can leave better fingerprints on your sourcing projects, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.

We look forward to your comments.

What Tech Gifts Should You Buy Now For The Holidays?

October 21st, 2021

In a BLOG that I wrote about a month ago

 

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

In a BLOG that I wrote about a month ago, I warned about the upcoming supply shortages that could occur this holiday season.  Well a month later it appears that it may be worse than expected.  Many are saying that you need to start your holiday shopping now to ensure that you get the items need.  Almost everything that we will be buying this season will be affected in some way or another.  But the items that will be most affected are the ones that are usually the hottest items of the season, electronics.  These items will be hard to find because of the shortage of semiconductors which experts are saying could last well into 2022 and they do not expect things to return to normal before the first half of 2023.  Below are some of the hot electronics that you may to start buying now before it’s too late.

  • Laptops
  • Computer Monitors
  • Televisions
  • Soundbars
  • Robot Vacuums
  • Nintendo Switch
  • Sony PlayStation 5
  • Xbox Series X and Series S
  • Amazon Echos
  • Amazon Kindle Paperwhite
  • Apple TV 4K
  • Apple Watch
  • Apple iPads
  • Samsung Galaxy Buds+
  • Apple AirPods Pro

Interested in learning how SafeSourcing can help your company run more efficiently?  If you would like more information on how SafeSourcing can help your procurement efforts, or on our Risk Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service RepresentativeWe have an entire team ready to assist you today.

 

 

 

Cancelled Sysco Orders Hurt Phoenix Restaurants  

October 20th, 2021

Some restaurant owners said that they have had to reduce their menu offerings

 

Today’s post is by Gayl Southard, Vice President of Administration at SafeSourcing Inc.

On October 8th, restaurant owner Mike Baum, waited six hours in line at the Sysco warehouse in Tolleson, AZ to pick up food for his restaurant, only to leave empty handed. He was able to secure an order the following week after waiting four hours.  Baum and several local restaurant owners report challenges in obtaining supplies not only from Sysco, but other distributors as well.  Braun reported he can’t get corn on the cob although it is available from Kansas.  There are no trucks to transport it to Arizona.  Braun was told the lack of labor; truck drivers and warehouse workers are the cause of the supply chain delays.  Sysco is one of the largest food and kitchenware suppliers in the country.  Shannon Mutschler, a spokesperson for Sysco made the following statement to the Arizona Republic Newspaper: “Sysco regrets that we have had to delay or pause service for a limited number of customers in various locations.  This is mainly due to unprecedented labor shortages in the industry.  We are aggressively recruiting delivery partners and warehouse associates, and our goal is to restore service to our impacted customers as soon as possible.”

Some restaurant owners said that they have had to reduce their menu offerings due to lack of product.  Julia Chugerman, owner of Verdura restaurant in Phoenix works with US Food, as well as a local supplier.  One of the more popular menu items her restaurant relies on oyster mushrooms.  The mushrooms have been difficult to source.  Other vegetables, such as Brussel sprouts arrive moldy, or they aren’t in stock.  She has been substituting broccoli for Brussel sprouts.

Sysco isn’t the only distributor that restaurant owners are having difficulty getting products.  Some days it’s the liquor distributors and some days it’s trying to source straws and other paper products.  It is difficult for the customers that frequent restaurants to understand how frustrating this is on the restaurant owners and their staff.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can help your procurement efforts, or on our Risk

Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service RepresentativeWe have an entire team ready to assist you today.

 

References:

Pricilla Totlyapungprasert, WSJ, 10/16/2021