Insights and Ideas for Purchasing and Procurement professionals
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Suppliers, like customers, are strategic business partners. Yet relationship management practices are often very different for sales and procurement. Supplier relationship management (i.e. SRM) tends to get the short end of the stick. Poorly managing supplier relationships can mean actual loss and cost for the company.
Sourcing is more strategic, as procurement is more tactical. In the sourcing phase, you ensure that you get the best terms for price and value. This is also the phase where you can analyze your company’s spend and reduce it. Procurement deals with the flow of goods and services based on that contract.
The more complex manufacturing gets, the more collaborative its procurement process needs to be. For the most advanced manufacturing method, Engineer-to-Order (ETO) production, procurement means a balancing act of an array of needs in constantly changing conditions.
In times of turmoil and crisis, discretionary costs are the first place where you can quickly pull back to stay afloat
The RFQ process can be divided into four steps: preparation, processing, awarding, and closing. It is one of the most powerful processes a buyer can use to get price information from the supplier market.
I had been working in procurement for a couple of years when I finally realised that request for quotation (RFQ) and request for proposal (RFP) are not the same thing
We’re living in an era of the fourth industrial revolution. Yet our ways of life and work still largely stem from the second revolution that took place nearly 150 years ago.
Coronavirus is testing the global supply chains as we’re witnessing a real-life experiment on how a virus outbreak can affect the economy in a matter of days.
Keeping spend under management is an integral part of any efficient organisation. But before you can manage anything, you need to thoroughly understand the terms, processes and expected outcomes relevant to your company.