Sourcing Strategy

Buy consultants and other professional services for up to 20% less

Professional services is a category of spend that is sometimes poorly understood and often not addressed when searching for cost saving opportunities, says Elaine Porteous, an independent procurement advisor. “If any area within the broad category of professional services has never been sourced or has not been addressed within the last three years, your company […]

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Update: New developments in the “Catering Services” marketplace.

“After benchmarking staff catering for a number of years some interesting changes have occured that are affecting this crucial support service,” says Alan Low of Purchasing index. “At the turn of the century many organizations had outsourced staff catering usually to one of the better known service providers, e.g. Royal, KKS, Fedics, etc. who usually

Update: New developments in the “Catering Services” marketplace. Read More »

BEE procurement compliance “Bureau” service launched

Does your company buy from non-BEE suppliers when a BEE supplier could have been used? Cape Town based CCI-Growthcon have developed an innovative approach to ensure maximum utilisation of BEE suppliers based on their description based spend analysis software – available monthly on a bureau basis. According to Marc Silberbauer of CCI-Growthcon “On a monthly

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Current procurement systems and practices will fail BEE verification requirements.

The South African economy in all its diversity, presents BEE Verification Agencies with a reality that differs substantially from the corporate standard envisioned by the authors of the BBBEE Codes of Good Practice. “This is not to say that Verification is critically affected, or that adherence to the codes becomes impossible, but rather that both

Current procurement systems and practices will fail BEE verification requirements. Read More »

Are you getting the best prices in a “downward” cycle? PC market update.

In a cyclical market where prices are going up or down, how do you know when your organisation is getting a good deal from a supplier? The graph (click on the image to view it) shows what happened to one major UK organisation over a six and a half year period as the prices in

Are you getting the best prices in a “downward” cycle? PC market update. Read More »

Finding a cure for “BAD” contracts and outsourcing deals?

“It is a well researched fact that the majority of outsourcing deals become unsatisfactory to one of the partners involved, within the first two years of the agreement, Cecil Harris, MD of ODMS tells SmartProcurement. This dissatisfaction could range from poorly delivered services to unhappiness with the pricing. “Invariably all outsourcing deals require a degree

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New BEE “pop-up ” tool launched

Local e-Procurement platform provider MWEB CommerceZone has launched an innovatove solution that makes the arduous task of implementing and driving preferential procurement easier and faster. The company developed a “BEE pop-up tool” within its hosted e-Procurement platform. “This gives individuals placing an order “at-a-glance” insight into the precise BEE status of every sourced supplier, making

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Measuring suppliers on ownership can result in no verified BEE points at all!

Increasingly companies, even those that have not had their BEE positions verified, are instituting systems to track their BEE procurement spend. The reasons for this being pretty obvious, procurement accounts for 20 points (out of 100) of a company’s BEE score. There is however a disconnect between the data procurement departments are preparing and what

Measuring suppliers on ownership can result in no verified BEE points at all! Read More »

New Broad Based Empowerment vs Cost Savings – walking a tightrope?

All too often BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) is dealt with in one of two extremes, that is to say all or nothing. On the ‘all’ side some procurement departments only consider suppliers who present a specific empowerment score, usually with substantial black ownership. This narrow based approach is clearly out of touch with B-BBEE and

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Innovative new tool for analysing uncategorised spend

Through strategic sourcing many procurement organisations have improved their management of raw materials purchases. The next level of savings opportunities lie in the products and services that have not been tracked through the material master or buyer catalogue. Up to now, it has been almost impossible to deal with this aspect of procurement because it

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