Today’s post is written by Heather Powell, Director of Major Accounts and Special Projects at SafeSourcing Inc.

Procurement of potato salad? How many types of potato salad can you name? What are your favorites? What ingredients make the potato salad your favorite?  Do you walk up to a deli counter and get overwhelmed by the sheer number of potato salad behind the glass? Do you spend your valuable time to make your own potato salad?

The types and number of potato salad is limitless. Every region and continent has their type of potato salad. If you can imagine an ingredient to be included into the potato salad, then a recipe or manufacture has probably created it. There are varieties of potatoes that can be used for potato salad, as well as, the various types of “sauce”. There is even a debate if potato salad can be served hot, such as the German potato salad.

This author’s mother would often make her own potato salad, but in her later years she would buy cheap potato salad and “doctor it up” by adding additional ingredients like more mustard or celery seed, eggs, onion, or whatever else she could imagine. This often created some very tasty salads and only one time in this author’s memory can remember a not so great potato salad with an overzealous garlic powder version of potato salad.

You are probably wondering what any of this has to do with procurement.  I often use potato salad to explain to family, friends, and even strangers what procurement is and why it is important. Potato salad has so many facets of purchasing requirements, whether the salad is pre-made by a manufacture or homemade. Where do the potatoes come from? How are they processed? Mayonnaise or Miracle Whip? Yellow Mustard or grain mustard? Eggs? Spices? Celery? Even bacon?

Why there are three to five different types of potato salad behind the glass at the deli counter and why do the price per pound vary so much if the potato salads visually look similar? How would you choose which one to purchase? In explaining what procurement is, it is also important to explain why sampling is critical to making a purchase.  The best deli departments are the ones who will let you sample each of the potato salads and be able to tell you what makes each one unique to be behind the glass and not in some plastic bucket in the refrigerator section to be purchased by the gallon.

This author hopes that you find this series fun and educational. In part two of the Procurement of Potato Salad, this author will start at the “root” of procurement of the potatoes for potato salad.

SafeSourcing can assist you in exploring your procurement solutions for your business or on our “Risk Free” trial program for RFPs and RFQs, 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 Troy Lowe, Vice President of Development at SafeSourcing.

Hiring new employees can be a very daunting task.  Sometimes it can be a real struggle finding the right talent.  Even if you find the right talent, the new hire may not fully satisfy your company’s needs.  This can result in wasted time and money.  As a result of this, a lot of companies choose to work with staffing agencies to help them find the right talent.  When done in-house, the vetting process for a new hire can be very time consuming and expensive.  Staffing agencies can help with this because they do all of the vetting and may absorb other costs such as skill assessments, background checks, drug screenings, driving records and training.  Using a staffing agency ensures that you get qualified candidates that can come aboard and start being productive right away.  Below are some other reasons to consider working with a staffing agency.

• Faster Hiring Process
• Better Candidates
• Save Money
• Superior Market Knowledge
• Lower New Employee Overhead
• Performance Guarantees
• More Effective Job Descriptions
• More Access to Experienced Candidates

If you are planning to hire new employees and would like help finding a staffing agency, feel free to contact SafeSourcing.   We can gather all the necessary information for you and help you decide which one meets your needs.  If you would like more information on how SafeSourcing can help you, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service representative.  We have an entire team ready to assist you today.

We look forward to your comments.

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

When is the best time to procure? This is a question we get often and the answer varies. For many different goods and services, particular times of the year are best to take to market. For example, services like air conditioning repair often yield greater savings if they are taken to market during the winter or spring. This is generally because it can guarantee a provider a certain amount of work and they can budget their time ahead of time. If you seek pricing for air conditioning repair in the heat of the summer, providers may already be booked and may charge much higher rates than normal.

Another factor to consider when determining the best time to procure is market conditions. These can vary month to month, but paying attention to any recent news or trends in the market can delay the timing of your procurement event. For example, if you are seeking maple syrup and there have recently been any devastating natural disasters in Canada or the northeast US, you may want to delay your procurement efforts until the product is more readily available and more competitive pricing can be obtained.

These are just two different factors that can affect the timing of your procurement efforts. There are many other things that could expedite or delay them further, like contract expirations, anticipated tariffs, etc. While we often get questions regarding the best time to procure, we can always give one piece of advice– talk to your procurement partner to plan the best timing for your procurement needs well beforehand. They can help you with all the factors that go into running a successful procurement project.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can help in 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.

Today’s post is by Alex Borbely, Director of Sales at SafeSourcing

In yesterday’s post we explored what Spend Analysis is and some of the experiences I have had spending time with customers during the review process.

Today we’ll look at the steps involved in Spend Analysis.

Typical Steps of Spend Analysis: Identify all the sources available for your spend data, from all of your departments, plants and business units. This includes accounts payable, general ledger, pCard, eProcurement systems, etc. Gather and consolidate all of your spend data into one central database. This can be difficult if your data is in different formats, different languages and different currencies, however, there are programs available specifically designed to accomplish this however not necessary and a simple Excel workbook may be used.

Cleanse your data. This includes finding and correcting errors in descriptions and transactions, as well as standardizing the spend data for easy viewing. Group, or link, your suppliers for better supplier management. For instance, purchases made from IBM, IBM Corp., or Cognos should all be grouped together, since they’re the same supplier. Categorize your spend. Whether you use specific industry standard classifications or your own company-specific categories, you need to be able to determine where your money is being spent. Office supplies, marketing travel, legal, direct and indirect spend should all be categorized appropriately.

Analyze your spend data. Ensure that you have negotiated the best contract deals per supplier now that all of your spend is identified. Ensure that all of your buyers are purchasing from preferred suppliers. Reduce the number of suppliers per category. Repeat. Performing a spend

analysis once is a great start to identifying savings, however, you need to continually update your data to ensure that contract terms are being adhered to, that buyers are purchasing from preferred suppliers and that savings opportunities are being identified.

Once the Spend Analysis is completed, and reviewed with the client, there are several lessons learned as a result:

1. Upon completion you now have a baseline for sourcing initiatives
2. Spend Analysis now becomes an enabler for process improvement
3. The known data is now a measurement device for cost reduction programs such as SafeSourcing’s Reverse Auction Events
4. Significant cost-savings opportunities through supplier and commodity consolidation
5. Enhanced compliance through effective spend and supplier monitoring, which by the way is part of the SafeSourcing full service program
6. Comprehensive spend visibility across direct and indirect commodities and services

In closing I cannot help but to remember something that was drilled into my head as a young individual by my parents: “It’s not about how much money you make, it’s about how you save it.” This says it perfectly as to why spend analysis is such a vital part of procurement planning.

For more information on how we can help you with your procurement needs or on our Risk Free Pilot program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service representative. We have an entire team ready to assist you today.

Today’s post is by Alex Borbely, Director of Sales at SafeSourcing

While visiting with retailers and manufacturers during the pilot event stage, and watching live events unfolding in front of the client, it is exciting times at SafeSourcing when we show what competition in procurement spend can do.  What other solution can a prospect see instant dollar’s fall right to their bottom line in a matter of a 20-minute reverse auction event?  SafeSourcing, thus far in 2018, has saved on average 24.5% for our clients.  All this falling right to their bottom line.  As I said to a new client watching their first reverse auction event this past week, their 22.3% in savings in one reverse auction event goes right to their bottom line.  I asked my client, how many new customer cups of coffee would you have to sell in order to see a similar impact on your bottom line?  Reality is that selling more in today’s competitive world is difficult without losing margin.  Reducing expense on spend with SafeSourcing’s full service events will add to bottom line profitability at a rate of 10X ROI on average.  This meaning what you pay for an event in most instances will be multiplied in savings by 10 times or more!

After our typical 2-pilot events are executed and the client witnesses the power of SafeSourcing’s  ePROCUREMNT and the reverse auction Event they then ask what’s next? Our typical response is let’s discuss what you spend your money on for both direct and indirect spends.  We usually get that deer in the headlights look and hear “well that is handled by many individuals within our organization and we would have to get with them to see if they know how much is spent in each category”.  The result is 9 out of 10 responses are that “they don’t know”.  This is when SafeSourcing suggests that we engage with the client and together we orchestrate a spend analysis to highlight spend and where SafeSourcing can assist with historical sourcing events results that is the proof of the pudding.  Let’s begin by understanding spend analysis:

Definition: Provide top level picture of spend. Spend Analysis is the process of collecting, cleansing, classifying and analyzing expenditure data with the purpose of decreasing procurement costs, improving efficiency, and monitoring controls and compliance. It can also be leveraged in other areas of business such as inventory management, contract management, complex sourcing, supplier management, budgeting, planning, and product development.

At SafeSourcing we use our internal tool and  process called SafeSpendAnalysis™

Tomorrow we’ll review the typical steps in a spend analysis during Part II!

For more information on how we can help you with your procurement needs or on our Risk Free Pilot program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service representative. We have an entire team ready to assist you today