Are your suppliers’ certifications compliant? Are you buyers being productive? Do you have visibility to your teams sourcing activity? How do you manage all your supplier relationships?
If you are a manufacturer, these are all probably common questions that you ask. In most cases, all this relevant data is scattered across different systems & platforms because managing suppliers has traditionally been done through hundreds of emails, phone calls, PDF’s, and spreadsheets between your organization and the supplier. As time goes by and your company grows, this information becomes significantly more difficult to find, access and use for buyers & sourcing teams.
Sourcing at the core is finding a good supplier, which might sound easy. But, for most companies like yours, you probably have a standard/requirement for your expectations on cost, quality, and delivery from your suppliers. This is where sourcing can become extremely difficult – weighing all those factors into a decision to select the best source/supplier. On top of that, COVID has added a twist to sourcing – inability to travel, the importance of diversification of supply base & emphasis on near sourcing.
What if there was an easier way to manage suppliers and optimize the way your sourcing and procurement teams work?
eSourcing, also known as “electronic sourcing”, allows all those same traditional sourcing tasks to be conducted however on a centralized, web-based platform instead of manual conversations & exchanges. This allows organizations like yours to have a full visibility to quoting history and more importantly, allows sourcing teams to act faster, with more information and make better decisions. The implementation of digital sourcing tools can help in many ways like:
- COLLABORATION – centralizes the location for different country or functional teams to discuss and collaborate on quoting activity as well as part information that is accessible across all departments/teams within your organization
- TRANSPARENCY – allows all parts of your organization to have access to a single source of truth for sourcing and supplier information
STANDARDIZATION – creates more structure around sourcing workflows to ensure consistency across the organization - SCALE – allows sourcing departments to more efficiently manage large volumes of data to yield better insights and drive better sourcing decisions
Over the last 2 years, if there is anything we learned – it’s that we must be ready for the unexpected and this just emphasizes the importance of having digital sourcing strategies that can be agile and efficient, which is one of the biggest benefits of eSourcing.