Your Company Needs an eSourcing Technology Tune Up
Your Company Needs an eSourcing Technology Tune Up
Most auto manufacturers use a careful mix of considerations to create a car that will appear attractive and alluring to a large audience, will meet environmental, safety, and other required standards, and will result in a large profit. And for the most part, consumers are just fine with these things.
But have you ever been driving during a long road trip and wished you could get just a few more miles out of your gas tank? Or that your acceleration time was just a fraction of a second faster?
Did you know that something as simple as improving airflow can improve your car’s performance? Well, the same principle applies to strategic esourcing technology.
Most e-sourcing tools will just make small adjustments most of the time. If your organization is already using an e-sourcing or e-auction tool, that’s awesome! Your procurement team is saving a bunch of money, probably about 10-20%, in addition to other huge benefits.
It’s safe to assume two things. One, your company believes in this approach. Two, you’re achieving some level of success.
With those kind of results, it’s easy to see how leaders can become comfortable. After all, 10-20% savings is pretty significant. But just like with your car, fine-tuning your esourcing technology program can make it perform at an even higher level.
It’s likely there are three things keeping your e-sourcing program from performing to its fullest potential. Let’s take a look at what may be getting in your team’s way.
Limited Resources
You have a great team running strategic esourcing events, but they just can’t reach every possible category.
Believe it or not, this is actually a great problem to have.
Many companies find it hard to get category managers on board with the esourcing technology process and struggle to identify potential categories. If you’ve got the events, just not enough time to run them all, working with e-sourcing experts that can become part of your team will allow you to improve your results.
E-Sourcing Expertise
You’ve probably got a talented procurement team and experienced category managers. But do you have e-sourcing experts on staff?
e-Sourcing Expert: A professional (or team of professionals) that specialize in identifying suitable e-sourcing categories, creating effective e-sourcing strategies, identifying potential qualified vendors, and building and managing e-sourcing projects from beginning to end – all the while your spend owner is calling the shots.
Offloading work-intensive projects or deferring to a dedicated e-sourcing account manager to run that HR Services event you’ve never tackled before can be a huge weight off your team.
Resources will start to free up, which will allow your team to refocus on other valuable activities and optimize spend.
Rigid Technology
There’s a high chance your team has found their hands tied because of limitations of the e-sourcing tool itself. Many e-auction tools are simply not designed to handle complex categories. Within those outliers, you’ll find some of your biggest savers. How many times have your team’s plans to run a sourcing event been foiled because the tool couldn’t handle it?
