How can procurement excellence help businesses improve cost efficiency

In recent years, companies have started focusing on procurement excellence to capitalize on their core competencies and keep pace with the rapid rate of globalization and stringent regulations. Many procurement organizations are focusing their attention on the services spend to enhance the saving opportunities and gain better business value. Like most other organizations, businesses face challenges when attempting to streamline their international procurement activities.

Consequently, procurement experts are focusing on efficient ways to operate in complex environments and combat the so-called “four challenges” such as:

• Increasing product diversity
• Shortening product lifecycles
• Fluctuating materials and commodity prices
• Relentless regulatory pressures

What is procurement excellence? In general, it is all about understanding corporate leadership expectations for the function and meeting these expectations to improve competitiveness. While purchasing, organizations should also emphasize on spending, so that organizations can examine how they approach procurement and enhance their overall performance. Procurement excellence at large primarily focuses on bringing supplier insights, innovation, and information around the company for robust value creation. With the help of procurement excellence, organizations can assess their internal processes, policies, governance, tools, and systems to identify the areas of improvement.

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Let’s talk about the four pillars of procurement excellence

Spend analysis: For the sustenance of any supply management initiative, organizations should have the ability to access, organize, and analyze the spend data. Moreover, businesses should also automate and streamline their complete spend management lifecycle to gain better visibility into their spending patterns and make informed sourcing, supplier, and informed business decisions.

Strategic sourcing: Strategic sourcing plays a pivotal role in formalizing the way the information is gathered. It can have the greatest impact on the total cost of ownership, quality, and the performance in the supply chain process. Organizations focusing on procurement excellence should focus on strategic sourcing to mitigate risks, reduce costs and improve the overall performance.

Contract management: Contract lifecycle management can be considered as the prominent and the most efficient way to streamline the entire contract lifecycle in an organization. With the help of contract management, businesses can systematically and efficiently maximize their performance and make low-risk deals that are compliant with the industry standards.

Supplier management: The vicious circle of the supply chain remains in maintaining and improving the supply base through ensuring competitiveness, operational efficiency, and cost structures. Businesses should source the right supplier mix and deliver timely and holistic insights into the supplier capabilities, interactions, and performance.

Along with these strong pillars of the procurement excellence, prominent factors such as strategy, organizational design, people, and tools can be leveraged to develop specific actions that can help organizations achieve a higher level of sustainable excellence.

Success Story

Strategic Sourcing Analysis Helps A Leading Energy Drinks Manufacturer Transform Procurement and Drive Higher Savings

Challenge: The client wanted to develop robust sourcing analysis capabilities across categories and geographies to enhance their visibility into spend areas and drive higher savings.

Benefits offered: The client was able to deploy an automation system solution that integrated the end-to-end procurement process from source to contract — one that connected the results of sourcing events to the resulting buyer and supplier contracts.

Insights offered: The solution helped the client take advantage of the potential opportunities, changing market factors, and unforeseen circumstances with rapid responses.

Developing a competitive procurement process is crucial for companies to develop effective strategies. Stay ahead by requesting service on our procurement platform to gain the latest insights into procurement risks.

SpendEdge Advantage

SpendEdge shares your passion for driving sourcing and procurement excellence. We act as a global strategic partner for leading Fortune 500 firms and other leading companies across industries. Our strength lies in delivering robust, real-time procurement market intelligence solutions that helps sourcing and procurement professionals make informed decisions. Our innovative procurement solutions also help enterprises transform structural capabilities, improve execution efficiency, and fast-track time to savings. Every business needs smart procurement intelligence to stay at the top of their game; we provide actionable insights utilizing lean methodology to help enterprises make better purchasing decisions. We provide businesses with the precise combination of resources, tools, and techniques to help them redefine sourcing and procurement capabilities. We cover a wide spectrum of industries starting from pharmaceutical and life sciences to transportation with expertise in supply market intelligence, spend analysis and benchmarking, supply chain risk assessment, and category management.