How to Master Reverse Bidding: A Guide for Buyers For years, negotiations were performed by email or phone with a RFP (request for proposal) or an RFQ (request for quotation), which was a time-consuming and stressful process. The endless back-and-forth could take days, sometimes weeks or months to source the needed service or materials. However, […]
How to Optimize Your Sourcing in 5 Steps Optimizing your sourcing has many benefits, including time and cost savings. Sourcing optimization involves finding the most cost-effective group of suppliers for your needs. Yet, true optimization goes a step beyond. Besides cost-effectiveness, you want to keep time restrictions, quality, and resources in mind. The best eSourcing […]
Unethical Sourcing Practices in Procurement and How to Avoid Them In procurement, unethical practices can be hard to spot. Say you took a gift or a low price from a vendor, neither of which seemed unethical at the time. Yet these things, along with other seemingly inoffensive actions, may be considered unethical. It’s critical to […]
Sourcing is an integral part of procurement management and an upstream part of the supply chain, affecting its overall success. Sourcing is the acquiring of goods and services needed to run a business or make a product. However, sourcing is more than just acquisition—it also involves seller selection, negotiation for contracts, and evaluation of your […]
eAuction tools are imperative to sourcing, affecting your sourcing, procurement management, and ultimately, the entire supply chain. However, eAuctions are simply auctions conducted electronically to have a transaction occur between the supplier and the buyer. Reverse auctions and their respective types are the most common types of eAuctions. software is typically cloud-based, which means nothing […]
Advanced analytics exceeds standard business intelligence (BI) using state-of-the-art technology and tools to create data asset information and real-time statistics. These diagnostic analyses help businesses predict market trends, optimize global supply chains, to make quicker, strategic decisions to pursue financial opportunities. Analytic techniques include data mining, eSourcing software, semantic analysis, complex event processing, predictive modeling, […]
Nearly everyone is familiar with a “normal” auction, in which a vendor puts up a good for sale, buyers compete for it, and the highest bidder wins the good. However, in an ereverse auction, it is the exact opposite: a buyer makes it known that they need a good or service; instead, the vendors compete for […]
Not all procurement and eSourcing software are created the same—perhaps your current solution lives up to expectations in some areas but the eSourcing module isn’t quite what you need. Maybe it’s overcomplicated, delivering a poor user experience and mountains of frustration for your team—after you’ve just spent mountains of cash to acquire it. This is […]
Spend analysis is a process that identifies, cleans, categorizes, and analyzes your business spend data. . However, there is more to this question than meets the eye. The process of spend analysis has specific goals of efficiency and saving money by increasing visibility into spend, which can decrease overall procurement costs. Read on to learn […]
“Tail Spend” refers to all of the high-volume, low-cost expenses a company incurs that aren’t typically managed, let alone optimized. Tail spend examples include purchases that are often too small to go through procurement, such as basic office supplies or employee gifts. Because purchases are small, they usually fall through the cracks, making it tough […]