What is Procurement Savings and Why do Companies need Cost Reduction Strategy in Procurement?
The evolution of procurement and sourcing has led to an unexpected transformation across industries, including the increasing need for strategic changes, cost-effectiveness, innovation, and novel competitive approaches. Staying ahead of the curve is challenging and often requires the efficient and data-driven execution of various comprehensive strategies. As companies attempt to keep pace with the market and develop unique strategies, CPOs must leverage data to create an effective cost reduction strategy and utilize these changes to increase procurement savings. Along the supply chain and through the procurement process, companies must capitalize on multiple significant and effective cost-saving opportunities to gain and maintain a competitive edge. A well-informed, data-driven, and accurate cost reduction strategy can help companies identify, evaluate, and leverage these opportunities to minimize losses, reduce unnecessary expenses, improve spend management, and increase overall profitability and savings. Additionally, a cost-effective business helps companies reduce risks, offer competitive prices, improve efficiency, and identify shortcomings along the supply chain.
What are the Top 7 Cost Reduction Strategies in Procurement to Increase Savings?
Reduce Maverick Spend: A large organization requires various major investments, purchases, and deals along the supply chain, leading to overlap, inaccuracy, fraud, and other potential risk factors or unnecessary expenses. Centralizing data, making all expenses the responsibility of a singular department, ensuring all purchases are properly recorded, and providing CPOs with all necessary information regarding purchase requirements can help significantly reduce maverick spending. For various reasons, minimizing maverick spending is a substantially effective cost reduction strategy in procurement, and in employing the same, companies can help optimize cost savings.
Review Supplier Terms: In every company, market, and industry, suppliers and vendors play a pivotal role in the quality of product, lead time, customer satisfaction, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. When negotiating with a supplier, the agreed-upon terms of the contract can often provide a skewed or less beneficial effect for companies, particularly if the professionals are unaware of certain major cost reduction opportunities available to them. As companies attempt to improve procurement savings, they must review current and developing contract terms with suppliers, revisit the influencing and determining factors, and identify opportunities to reduce costs. This highly effective cost reduction strategy in procurement that can substantially increase cost savings for companies.
Consolidate Data: Over recent years, data analytics and information have started to play a non-negotiable role in the efficacy, quality, and efficiency of supply chains across industries. By employing a centralized data system, companies can consolidate all necessary information regarding purchases, requirements, purchase orders, and other expenses that arise. Access to this data can help CPOs identify unnecessary expenses, reconsider various purchasing habits or clauses, and find effective ways to reduce excess spending. Additionally, consolidated data provides transparency to stakeholders, professionals, CPOs, and suppliers, creating space for healthier, more effective relationships and better purchasing decisions.
Assess Requirements: As time passes, companies evolve, as do their departments, purchase needs, expenses, demands, and other major influencing factors impacting costs, expenses, and savings. To keep pace with these changes, CPOs must regularly revisit purchasing requirements, assess the accuracy, efficacy, and importance of current purchasing patterns, identify the potential for improvement or reduction and implement the same. In doing so, the company can identify unnecessary expenses, find gaps in the supply chain, make changes to reduce potential negative impact, and ensure unnecessary spending is minimized substantially. This cost reduction strategy can also help companies evolve with the market, keep pace with internal needs, and improve long-term decision-making.
Optimize Inventory Management: For every company in every industry, the importance of efficient, accurate, and data-driven inventory management cannot be overlooked. As companies grow, inventory requirements significantly change, and leveraging data, efficiency, and preemptive strategies is crucial to managing these fluctuations effectively. Optimizing inventory management can help minimize unnecessary stocking charges, reduce shortages and customer dissatisfaction, increase overall cost-effectiveness, and significantly improve supply chain efficiency. Additionally, this cost reduction strategy helps improve demand forecasting, keep pace with changing demand trends, overcome potential inventory risks, and stay ahead of competitors.
Leverage Technology: The rise of digitization has encouraged companies to adopt, implement, and create effective strategies incorporating technology and data into their supply chains, making efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and improved performance a more achievable result. Leveraging technology can help companies overcome major inefficiencies and risks, minimize human error, improve company-wide communication and data exchanges, and keep pace with changing market fluctuations. Additionally, technology helps increase production rate, reduce losses, and enable lasting improvements along the supply chain. This sustainable, necessary, and effective cost reduction strategy in procurement that can significantly transform and improve cost savings through automation, IIoT, and other major digital changes.
Improve Risk Management: Every market and industry has risks of varying impact, severity, and importance, and overlooking these challenges or risks can lead to major losses, inefficiencies, and shortcomings over the years. As industries evolve, companies must ensure their strategies, business decisions, and operations can adapt to the market’s requirements to stay ahead of the curve. Risk assessment and management helps companies identify, evaluate, and develop preemptive strategies for various risks in the market, making their operations safer, business significantly stronger, and minimizing potential losses. Industry risks can lead to monetary losses, operational challenges, customer attrition, supply chain complexities, and other potential issues, therefore making risk management an effective and necessary cost reduction strategy in procurement across industries.
Success Story – SpendEdge Advantage
The rising demand, changing preferences, and evolving circumstances within the pharmaceutical industry since the rapid and unexpected spread of COVID-19 have led to various procurement and sourcing changes and given rise to the need for better cost reduction strategies in procurement. As the industry continues to transform, companies are evolving the need for robust, resilient, and efficient supply chains that minimize expenses, increase profitability, and improve performance consistently. In an attempt to develop a strong supply chain and reduce costs, a renowned pharma company based out of North America sought to partner with SpendEdge and leverage our expertise in cost benefit analysis and implementing the ideal cost reduction strategy in procurement. Our experts worked closely with the company’s supply chain and procurement teams and identified various significant opportunities for cost reduction and improved procurement savings. With a detailed analysis, effective recommendations, and unparalleled insights, our experts provided the company with an efficient, comprehensive, and sustainable cost reduction strategy that enabled lasting, significant and necessary changes within the supply chain and a substantial rise in savings.
