Supply Market Intelligence Helped a Processed Foods Manufacturer to Address Commodity-price Volatility and Save $15 Million

Processed Foods Industry Overview

Over 50 percent of the American diet consists of highly processed food items. The industry loosely tracks underlying demographic trends such as income growth and population and generates revenue from the sale of food to a whole host of consumers. It has proved its ability by delivering positive investment returns consistently. In fact, over the past few years, the processed foods industry in the US has delivered high single-digit annual total returns with much less volatility than the broader market indexes.

Business Challenges Faced

Rising competition from private label companies and value-conscious purchasing from consumers was creating downward pressure on prices of processed food items. The manufacturer was finding it hard to keep up with new trends, demand volatility, portfolio complexity, and development costs. Raw material prices which accounted for over 70% of direct material costs were becoming more volatile and impacting the major operations of the company. The client, therefore, decided to collaborate with SpendEdge to perform supply market intelligence study and gain real-time insights to address increasing volatility and improve the competitiveness of their organization.

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Our Research Approach

To address this situation, the experts conducted a comprehensive supply market intelligence study, that provided insights into core elements of market trends, commodity pricing, global capacity, government and regulatory norms impacting the sourcing process. They also offered insights into economic trends that could impact the organization’s supply chain.

With the help of supply market intelligence report and insights, the client determined the best framework for strategic, leverage, routine and bottleneck categories. Data coupled with market insights enabled the client to integrate cost modeling as a key capability within supply market intelligence. This provided input to budgeting activities and supplier switching decisions. SpendEdge’s recommendation to utilize supply market intelligence throughout the sourcing lifecycle also enabled the client to gain valuable insights at various stages of sourcing including strategy development, supplier identification, negotiation and contracting. This promoted a greater understanding of the supply market and helped them gain a competitive advantage.

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Engagement Outcome

The supply market intelligence solution offered helped the client to reduce exposure to commodity-price volatility and save $15 million in a span of three months. It also enabled the client to look beyond their direct suppliers and build up their understanding of the role of different players across the whole value chain.

A comprehensive supply market intelligence study is crucial for companies to minimize exposure to commodity price volatility and reduce costs. Subscribe now to access accurate supply market insights from our procurement experts.

Importance of Supply Market Intelligence

Enables companies to understand the market in which the supplier operates.
Reduces risk-intensive events involving suppliers and markets.
Forecasts global price levels, market trends, supplier quality, and delivery.
Identifies key resources needed to vet for quality and accuracy.

To know how supply market intelligence can help your organization gain a competitive edge, request for more information from our analysts.

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Assessing Competitors’ Category Strategies and Risks with the Aid of Category Market Intelligence Solution

SpendEdge, a leading provider of category market intelligence solutions, has announced the completion of their latest newsletter on assessing competitors’ category strategies and risks with the aid of category market intelligence solution. The article offers detailed insights into the benefits of category market intelligence solution reaped by our clients. The article also highlights how our category market intelligence services helped companies to boost sales, assess market dynamics, analyze competitors’ category strategies, and manage frequently sourced categories.

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Boosting Sales by 150% for an Online Fashion Retail Company

Rising global competition makes it difficult for companies operating in the retail industry to position their products and compete with the leading online retail channels. A developing online fashion retail company was facing predicaments in assessing global market dynamics and drivers that were impacting market trends. They wanted to analyze the retail market and assess competitors’ category strategies to compete with top-level companies in the industry.
The category market intelligence report offered helped the client to obtain detailed insights into the latest trends and developments that were going to define the global market. This helped them gain an overview of competitor companies in the international market, obtain accurate buyer insights, and analyze risks. An exclusive range of fashion products was also created by the client targeting the online consumers’ niche that resulted in a 150% hike.

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Managing Frequently Sourced Categories by Devising Category Market Intelligence Strategies

Enhancing category expertise and intelligence across all critical areas of the supply network has always been a tumultuous task for companies. One of our clients, a leading transportation services provider wanted to leverage our category market intelligence solutions to build world-class procurement solutions. They wanted to gain granular supplier-specific information to manage frequently sourced categories.

Our category market intelligence experts developed an internal intelligence unit for managing the regularly sourced categories. This involved making the right investments in the category intelligence tools that focused exclusively on a specific supply market. The solution offered helped the client to obtain comprehensive insights into the different categories within the supply network and improve procurement efficiency.

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Capitalizing on the Potential Market Opportunities and Identifying Risks

With the growth of the portable air conditioner market, companies are compelled to invest in specialized equipment and cutting-edge technologies. They are required to set prices competitively to avoid losing customers to other peers. The client, a prominent portable air conditioner company with business units spread across the globe decided to leverage our services to gain insights into the market landscape in terms of market drivers, dynamics, and niches. They wanted to capitalize on the opportunities to gain better visibility into their supply chain activities.

During the course of this engagement, our category market intelligence experts followed a blended approach comprising of interviews and discussions with leading stakeholders in the HVAC industry. They analyzed competitor’s category strategies and assessed the potential risks to comprehend suppliers and the cost structure. This helped the client to gain better insights into the buyers, the potential risks, and product portfolios.

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A Look into the Future of the Food and Beverage Industry Post the COVID 19 Pandemic- SpendEdge’s Vivek Sikaria Offers His Perspective on the Future Course of This Industry

April 23 2020

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SpendEdge’s Procurement Market Intelligence Services Helped an Insurance Company to Select One of the Top Locations for Contact Center Employment in Europe

Insurance Industry Overview

Constrained growth in the European insurance market has compelled insurance providers to be flexible and agile in adapting their operating models. They need to outsource business processes to maximize their full market potential and minimize spend. Companies must recognize the potential of sourcing options along the overall insurance value chain. This case study is a classic example of how we helped one of the leading insurance companies to explore new contact center locations and understand potential labor market through our procurement market intelligence services.

Business Challenges Faced

The client one of the leading insurance companies was facing predicaments in lowering the costs of the claims call center. They were looking to outsource a combination of customer relations, fraud/disputes, and collections phone calls to two different domestic locations to keep up with customer demand. However, this required the client a thorough understanding of potential labor markets in Europe that could support the project of their size. The client, therefore, decided to collaborate with SpendEdge to leverage their expertise in offering procurement market intelligence services. The primary objective of the insurance company was to understand the differences in cost between different geographies within Europe.

Key objectives the client aimed to achieve from the procurement market intelligence engagement were:

Explore new call center locations with a couple of key suppliers and identify and evaluate possible locations.
Better understand call center saturation and labor markets in each potential location.
Identify risks related to fraud and theft in each location.

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Analyzing Global Supply Markets with the Aid of Supply Market Intelligence Solution

SpendEdge, a leading provider of supply market intelligence solutions, has announced the completion of their latest presentation on analyzing global supply markets with the aid of supply market intelligence solution. The article offers detailed insights into the benefits of supply market intelligence solution reaped by our clients. The article also highlights how supply market intelligence services can help companies to closely monitor supply market conditions and improve supply chain strategies.

Developing Effective Supply Chain Strategies to Strengthen their Presence in North America

Intensifying global competition presents a plethora of challenges for companies operating in the chemicals industry. A leading company in North America was finding it difficult to address high-cost pressure and identify opportunities for organic growth. They wanted to improve their supply market intelligence process to address market complexities.

The solution offered by our experts helped the client to perform supply market intelligence analysis and gain real-time information on suppliers’ activities while improving supply chain efficiency. Also, it helped them develop superior supply chain strategies, reassess their footprint in Asia, and strengthen their presence in North America. Products without significant incremental sales were further identified to reduce non-profitable complexity and improve value-added processes.

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Analyzing the Global Supply Market for a Pharmaceutical Drugs Company

Understanding supply market forces and implementing a comparative analysis of the pharmaceutical drugs market has always been an arduous task for companies. One of our clients, a market leader in the pharmaceutical drugs segment wanted to leverage our supply market intelligence services to develop an effective supply chain management system.

Our supply market intelligence experts developed a commodity profile to better understand the market landscape. They determined cost structures of suppliers and identified key market indicators to identify the supply market trends. The solution offered helped the client to obtain detailed insights regarding the global supply market and develop an effective supply chain management system.

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Tackling Price Fluctuations and Realizing $30 Million in Savings

New technologies are expected to disrupt the automotive industry in the coming years. To address disruptions and identify potential opportunities, a leading company in the U.S automotive aftermarket industry collaborated with SpendEdge to leverage our expertise in offering supply market intelligence solutions. They wanted to develop an effective supply market intelligence strategy to minimize category spend and rebalance their global supply base.

During the course of this engagement, our experts extracted information from their internal databases and rationalized the supply base. They analyzed RFP responses from potential suppliers and conducted multiple rounds of negotiations to determine key suppliers. This helped the client to identify capable suppliers, address price fluctuations and supply market challenges, and realize $30 million in savings.

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About SpendEdge

SpendEdge delivers robust, real-time supply market intelligence solutions to help sourcing and procurement professionals analyze supply markets. Our innovative supply market intelligence help enterprises to transform the structural capabilities of businesses and improve execution efficiency. Our state-of-the-art supply market intelligence solutions also help enterprises to transform structural capabilities, improve execution efficiency, and achieve better cost savings. We provide businesses with actionable insights and techniques to improve their supply market intelligence capabilities.

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A Look into the Future of the Food and Beverage Industry Post the COVID 19 Pandemic- SpendEdge’s Vivek Sikaria Offers His Perspective on the Future Course of This Industry

April 23 2020

Vendor Evaluation: 5 Tips and Tricks to Streamline Procurement Operations for B2B Companies

April 20 2020

5 Key Coronavirus Risk Assessment Strategies to Overcome Healthcare Supply Chain Challenges

Procurement Market Intelligence: How a Pharmaceutical Company Achieved Cost Savings on Categories Using Plastic Polymers

The Business Challenge

A well-known pharmaceutical company that markets its products to healthcare practitioners, hospitals, and managed care providers in over 15 countries was facing predicaments in optimizing business process results. Their inability to track the supply market conditions was increasing the turnaround time for the Purchase Requisition (PR) to Purchase Order (PO) process. The lack of metric visibility, proper control mechanisms, and cultural barriers was restricting global standardization and scalability of business operations. The inefficient mechanisms were further resulting in excessive costs for the company.

Analyzing supply market conditions is crucial for companies to maximize ROI. Request a free proposal and access our complete portfolio of procurement market intelligence solutions.

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Solutions Offered

In partnership with the client, the procurement specialists at SpendEdge conducted a detailed analysis of the supply market from the perspective of the pharmaceutical company and offered them with in-depth procurement market intelligence insights. They formulated effective strategies for achieving sourcing and procurement excellence, which helped the client to maximize its ROI. This substantially reduced the time spent on analysis and curating information and enabled them to focus on strategic sourcing and cost reduction opportunities.

A centralized and standardized transactional procurement process was introduced to create strategic and tactical functions. Under the new scheme of things, strategic activities were performed to eliminate delivery disruptions and reduction in payment disputes. Unproductive and inefficient processes were further identified across sites to measure the effectiveness of service delivery results. The strategic group was made responsible for category management across sites to proactively leverage global volume and monitor industry trends.

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Key Findings

Reduced Cycle Time

The standardized processes refined the Purchase Requisition (PR) to Purchase Order (PO) process and reduced the cycle time to 0.5 days from 2 business days. The metrics implemented improved the visibility of productivity and service levels within three months. Also, the procurement market intelligence solution helped consolidated major suppliers in the supply market who can provide end-to-end service and meet their changing demands.

Achieved Cost Savings

The procurement market intelligence solutions rendered by experts further helped the client to realize cost savings on categories which predominantly use plastic polymers (as the prices of polymers declined from their level in 2017-18). They developed a robust contract compliance team and established a contract having provisions for raw material price adjustments to deal with market fluctuations.

How Procurement Market Intelligence Solutions Help Companies?

Procurement market intelligence solutions help gather and analyze the information relevant to a company’s supply markets and improve the procurement process. They help classify critical-to-quality factors that influence the buying behavior and leverage and identify the costs associated with energy, overhead, materials, labor, transportation, profit, and other cost components. Also, procurement market intelligence solutions help reduce risks, increase savings, and improve decision-making capabilities for companies.

Leveraging procurement market intelligence solutions can offer numerous benefits for businesses. Get in touch with our experts and know how our procurement services can help you leverage the benefits of procurement market intelligence solutions.

How Category Market Intelligence Services Helped a Retail Company to Increase Sales by 150% – A SpendEdge’s Success Story

The Business Challenge

The client – a developing online fashion retail company – was facing predicaments in selling their products. They were finding it hard to position their products in such a way that they can compete with the leading online retail channels in the international market. This compelled them to assess the global market dynamics and drivers that were impacting market trends. They also wanted to develop a market research report that can offer insights into the current situation in the retail market. Moreover, they were looking forward to analyzing competitors’ category strategies to compete with top-level companies in the industry.

Is your business revenue dwindling due to heavy market competition? Get in touch with our experts and know how our category market intelligence services can help you to analyze the global market trends and devise effective marketing strategies.

Solutions Offered

To help the retail e-commerce company devise effective marketing strategies that can tap the potential growth opportunities, the category market intelligence experts at SpendEdge tailored a comprehensive market research methodology. The extensive market research methodology included primary and secondary research coupled with meticulous qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques.

With the aid of the category market intelligence report, the client was able to analyze the performance of the market in a span of two weeks and obtain detailed insights into the latest trends and developments that were going to define the global market. By targeting the online consumers’ niche, the ecommerce company created an exclusive range of fashion products and achieved a 150% hike in sales after implementing the category market intelligence solutions. Furthermore, our experts offered a category market intelligence report that provided them with the overview of the competitor companies in the international market and the procurement best practices that they can follow. This helped the client to gain buyer insights, analyze risks and understand problems pertaining to suppliers.

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Key Findings

The category market intelligence solutions helped the client to gain accurate buyer insights and improve their sales by 150%. The analysis of the competitors’ category strategies guided the company to formulate effective marketing strategies that can maintain the sales by managing key risks in the supply chain.

What Is the Importance of Category Market Intelligence Solutions?

The category market intelligence solutions help companies to determine market size related to their products and gain detailed insights into the latest trends and developments. Additionally, it prepares companies to mitigate risks such as financially unstable vendors, fluctuations in commodity prices, regulatory change implications, and upstream supply chain interruptions in procurement.

Assessing market dynamics and predicting market sizing requires a great deal of expertise. Request a free demo and know how our experts can assist your company with effective category market intelligence solutions.

Procurement Intelligence Solutions for a Retail Company – A SpendEdge Success Story

Procurement Intelligence Solution Transforms Finance Operations and Enhances Supply Management

About the Client

The client is an American multinational retail-clothing firm. With over 500+ stores, the company employs around 57,000 people globally.

The Business Challenge

With changing consumer behavior and technological innovations, retailers across the globe are uncovering new ways to sustain from the disruption. Moreover, retail brands are coping with a long-term uptrend in commodity and other raw materials input prices, and rapidly shifting global supply chain. These mounting global supply chain complexity with retail markets is forcing retail companies to be more agile and react faster than other players in the market. This is where procurement intelligence comes into play. In today’s competitive market scenario, procurement intelligence is the key to establishing long-term strategic sourcing and supply management plans.

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How Market Intelligence Can Dramatically Boost Your Supply Chain

The supply chain in modern companies is increasingly complex and dynamic in nature. From suppliers and industries to raw materials and commodities, there have been steady changes taking place across the supply chain of new age companies. Furthermore, the increasing uncertainty in the economic markets are forcing organizations to closely monitor market conditions and respond appropriately through improved supply chain strategies.

Traditional ERP systems are undoubtedly highly useful management tools, but they are mostly blind to external data. Their “inside-out” approach can leave companies inadequately equipped when planning and executing competitive supply chain strategies. However, with the advent of new market intelligence tools can resolve this problem. With the help of supply market intelligence, ERP systems can now incorporate real-time insights on suppliers, customers, and competitors, thus creating a perspective to reduce risk and create a competitive advantage. Here are just five benefits companies can realize with a market intelligence intelligence-driven supply chain.

Improved supply chain strategies

It is vital to take into consideration the impact of potential events before undertaking supply chain planning. For instance, factors such as a sudden increase in demand, or in the event of any supplier undergoing a catastrophic event, companies must be able to be prepared to handle such situations. Market intelligence provides early warning signals and unique insights into events that are likely to occur. Furthermore, it can also help in assessing alternative suppliers and approaches. This prepares companies to handle unforeseen contingencies better.

Competitive advantage

Competitive advantage often comes to companies who are more agile, nimbler, and react faster when compared to their peers in the market. In fact, a quick reaction to unforeseen disruptions is the route for modern companies to gain a competitive advantage. For instance, if a particular supplier is struggling to meet the company’s demand, they can quickly move to an alternative. Or, if a key component may be difficult to procure, companies can lock up the supply before the competitor does. Market intelligence via real-time alerts is key to achieve this as it gives faster insights for companies to be prepared for contingencies in the future.

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