Procurement Consulting Firms – Bridging the Gap between Cost and Value

Maintaining an attitude of ‘needing to know everything’ is required of procurement organisations that are shifting from cost to value. By working with reputable procurement consulting firms, chief procurement officers can obtain actionable intelligence on their supply chains, procurement categories, and suppliers. The intelligence can help you act and plan proactively as you base your decisions on comprehensive, actionable, and critical information at every stage of the procurement lifecycle. This way, hiring one of the best procurement consulting firms makes perfect sense if you want to ensure the quality of your sources for a more profitable procurement process.

Hiring a procurement consulting firm can be cost-effective to your business, too. By hiring them, you do not have to hire additional in-house staff. This saves you from additional overhead costs associated with having more employees in your company. Procurement consultants are more flexible in finding and using resources for best results, and as long as you work with seasoned experts, you can count on their industry expertise to help you generate ideas and apply the best practices, while providing support to top management.

The best procurement consulting firms maintain an in-house database of thousands of online information sources and a network of over a million suppliers around the world. This way, their procurement analysts can create actionable intelligence and insights for you and other stakeholders in your business. They offer procurement intelligence solutions that will enable you to benchmark and measure the performance of current suppliers, identify early warning signs pertaining to supply chain risks, track the changes of your procurement categories, and ensure a sustainable supply chain. They help you ensure compliance with supplier monitoring regulations and standards, while strengthening your relationships with every supplier. Procurement consultants can help you find niche and new suppliers, and find solutions that can help you negotiate well and save on costs.

3 Essentials of Procurement Based on Category Management

Supplier business models and procurement categories continue to evolve as fast as globalisation’s progress and advancements in technology. Hence, it makes good sense for category managers to establish a proactive approach to planning their categories by referring to actionable market intelligence. To achieve this, they need access to timely and comprehensive insights, which will enable them to develop and implement effective sourcing strategies. Likewise, they need to keep tabs on category developments to identify the early signs of risks and minimise disruptions to their supply chain. 

1. Hiring experts for help - Responsible procurement organisations understand the importance of intelligence mechanisms and category strategies that extend to indirect procurement categories such as HR, finance, IT, logistics, and their facilities. However, not all organisations may have enough manpower to deal with disruptions from those categories. In that case, hiring category intelligence specialists and consultants can help in monitoring those categories and enabling the company to understand each category and how it can affect the procurement process.

2. Category strategy development – Category managers should be able to understand the landscape of the supply market and create effective category plans. To achieve those objectives, they need access to secondary research sources and industry experts and seasoned analysts who can provide critical input on creating effective category strategies and applying the best practices specific to every category.

3. Category intelligence – After developing a category plan and defining a sourcing strategy, category managers must closely observe every variable that can affect the plan. They must observe variables such as the entry of new players, changes in pricing, macroeconomic changes, regulatory changes, technological developments, and consolidations occurring within the sector. It is recommended that category managers work with seasoned category management and intelligence specialists who can serve as an extension of their buying organisation. That way, they can free up resources and leave the monitoring and analysis to the experts. Seasoned category analysts can deliver actionable insights in the form of annual updates, periodic newsletters, and sector reports.

Supply Chain Risk Management Providers – The Right Selection is a Must

Supply chain risk management is no doubt necessary in procurement organisations, but here’s the reality: Not all of your procurement teams and specialists will have enough time to examine all aspects of their company’s supply chain—particularly the n-tier suppliers. In most cases, they will only be able to examine their critical suppliers and may overlook other elements that can cause problems to the supply chain of an organisation. For this reason, hiring supply chain risk management providers is recommended. With supply chain risk management specialists, your business should be able to achieve deeper visibility into its extended supply chain to identify risk and key performance indicators, which must be monitored to avoid any surprises.

Selecting supply chain risk management providers should be done carefully to ensure that you are hiring the right professionals. To get started, determine and understand your needs and the current risks in your supply chain, then look up a reputable provider of supply chain risk management solutions that follows a systematic approach in addressing the risks using a proven process. Consider a provider that maps and identifies interdependencies in your extended supply chain by collecting information on your critical suppliers and analysing the information to determine how dependent they are on one another.

Seasoned supply chain risk management providers are capable of mapping potential risk areas by conducting research on countries and markets that can have a significant impact on your n-tier suppliers in every procurement category. Likewise, they identify risk indicators, which must be monitored for every category. Monitoring the risk indicators and spotting risk signals are crucial steps in proper supply chain risk management. You can leave those tasks to experienced providers who use a reliable category intelligence framework to keep tabs on risk indicators linked to your procurement categories. You will be provided with updates in the form of periodic newsletters, news alerts, and reports, so you can always be informed on any potential risk that can come from your extended supply chain.

Financial Services Research Trends In 2017 – What to Look For

Custom financial research continues to thrive across asset classes, geographies, and sectors to meet economic, industry, thematic, and company research needs of different investors. Even organisations with their own research teams engage financial research service providers for support, especially when it comes to keeping themselves updated with the latest financial services research trends. Now more than ever, financial services research matters—especially amid the changes occurring in the financial sector of many countries, including the UK.

One of the major trends in financial services research for 2017 is concerned with processing and handling large amounts of data. It is now essential for sell-side researchers or IRPs, investment bankers, private equity partners, investment advisors, and asset managers to have access to financial research providers who can assist them and their in-house researchers. Research providers can manage data-intensive and repetitive tasks. The same experts can cost-effectively and flexibly handle peak-load situations, too, so you can focus on generating revenue and ideas, portfolio optimisation, and client management, and increase the profitability and quality of your financial research.

With regards to changes in buyer behaviour, financial services research is expected to make an impact on investment management in 2017, especially since millennials are joining in the investing marketplace. Securities and exchange authorities have increased regulations and recommended the use of automation and other technologies that can make investment management easier for firms.

Financial services research can make it easier for investment advisors, asset managers, private equity partners, and investment bankers to efficiently provide their services to new investors. Service providers can help them identify emerging acquisition targets and investment themes, and provide support for time-sensitive deals. Likewise, they can reduce the likelihood of information overload, and provide assistance in controlling research costs by boosting the capabilities of in-house research teams.

Reshape and Refresh Your Supply Chain with Supplier Sustainability Management Solutions

These days, supply chain sustainability is not only dependent on reputational factors, but also the financial aspects that may affect your suppliers. The latest GRI G4 guidelines emphasised the growing focus on supply chain performance reporting, too, making it more essential for chief procurement officers in your organisation to ensure and maintain a proactive approach in that direction. Procurement organisations typically issue sustainable procurement guidelines, enlisting expectations they have on suppliers based on common parameters for sustainability to serve as a screener when choosing and before taking in a supplier. However, to ensure sustainable procurement, your organisation must do more than that and focus on a more in-depth assessment of every supplier. This is where a supplier sustainability management solution can help.

Effective supplier sustainability management encourages thorough and constant assessments on suppliers. Likewise, it encourages organisations to engage suppliers on sustainability issues that may affect the way they run their business and deal with the organisation. That way, suppliers can continuously improve their performance and develop better relationships with your business. Procurement intelligence analysts and specialists follow a comprehensive framework to assess the sustainability of suppliers across geographies and industries. This way, you can have a supplier sustainability management solution that can effectively refresh and reshape your supply chain and how you deal with your supplier.

A good sustainability assessment framework should check the supplier’s compliance with standards and regulations related to governance, social, and environmental parameters. It uses best-in-class approach to determine the efficacy of policies, initiatives, and strategies your suppliers are taking to enhance their sustainability objectives. For that to work, a supplier sustainability management solution must be tailored to the procurement system of your organisation. That way, you can rely on custom sustainability assessment reports that can help you uncover the critical areas where a supplier may need to improve.

3 Services from Your Supply Chain Consultant That Can Help Streamline Your Business

As your business learns the importance of shifting from cost to value, it becomes more vital than ever to have actionable intelligence on your supply chains, procurement categories, and suppliers. Hiring an experienced and skilled supply chain consultant can help streamline your business in many ways. With their help, you can make informed decisions to improve your manner of planning and acting proactively. Here are three crucial services that a supply chain consultant can provide to enable proactive procurement:

1. Supply chain risk management – Risks in the supply chain can come from critical suppliers and the extended or n-tier suppliers. Hence, it is important for your business to be able to see through every aspect of the supply chain and be able to identify risk and performance indicators to avoid surprises. Supply chain risk management can increase your visibility into your extended supply chain through ongoing monitoring of critical suppliers and supply chain mapping. The supply chain consultant can continuously monitor key risk indicators in your supply chain, too. That way, any risk indicator can easily be spotted and resolved before it causes further problems.

2. Supplier risk assessment – Critical suppliers must be monitored and assessed thoroughly based on factors like their financial health, sustainability, and the status of their business. A supply chain consultant can conduct the assessment on your behalf, while performing on-going market intelligence to uncover any risk, which your critical suppliers may be exposed to.

3. Sourcing intelligence – The supply chain consultant can provide in-depth analytical insights and intelligence to help you develop tactical and strategic sourcing requirements, which are crucial for reducing the costs of sourcing. It should help you minimise sourcing time, boost negotiation intelligence, and broaden your portfolio of suppliers, too.

Importance of Procurement Consultancy Services in Changing Markets

Boosting the sustainability of your supply chains can do wonders for your business. To achieve this, hire seasoned procurement consultants who can understand how your procurement categories and supply chain works. The sustainability of a supply chain may provide financial and reputational connotations. Likewise, it helps chief procurement officers maintain a proactive approach to better procurement practises. With procurement consultancy services, your organisation can go beyond its sustainable procurement guidelines and examine other aspects of the supplier that may affect your supply chains.

Often times, sustainable procurement guidelines only tackle the expectations you have from suppliers based on common parameters for sustainability. Hence, they simply serve as a screening criteria for choosing and getting new suppliers. But to achieve sustainable procurement, you must conduct periodic and thorough assessments of every supplier, too. Moreover, you need to identify their sustainability issues and learn how to engage them about those issues to help them improve their performance. This is where procurement consultant services can help.

Experienced and reputable procurement consultants rely on a comprehensive sustainability assessment framework to assess suppliers across geographies and industries. This way, they can check whether your suppliers are compliant with standards and regulations pertaining to social, governance, and environmental parameters. Likewise, they use the best-in-class approach to determine the efficacy of policies, initiatives, and strategies the suppliers are taking to achieve their sustainability objectives. That way, you can discover critical areas where certain suppliers may need to improve in terms of sustainability performance.

You can rely on procurement consultancy services for supplier engagement solutions, too. With their help, it will be easier to engage suppliers on existing sustainability issues and tell them how and what to improve. Procurement consultants can act as facilitators to effectively and promptly engage suppliers. They can provide you with information on best practices, which you can share with suppliers to reduce their reputational risk and boost their sustainability performance, too.