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.

Good KPO Can Help Save Time and Money for Small Consulting Firms

KPO stands for knowledge process outsourcing and it deals with the outsourcing of core business activities that are related to information gathering and analysis. These tasks are integral for all consulting firms, regardless of their size. In fact, even a small consulting firm must be able to conduct proper information gathering and analysis to remain competitive.

However, not all small consulting firms have the resources to hire dedicated staff to take care of information-related tasks. Is this the case for your firm? Good KPO may be the solution you need to save time and money in the long run. Reputable KPO providers offer their advanced technical and analytical skills to small consulting firms that are looking for experts to support their research and free up their time for value-added activities.

Knowledge process outsourcing may help small consulting firms boost their productivity and manage peak-load. In terms of information gathering and analysis, good KPO can give you access to thousands of secondary research sources such as news websites, databases, research reports, trade associations, and blogs. You will receive comprehensive research deliverables that are customised to your unique requirements. Seasoned KPO providers can deliver precise information within a short period of time, so your firm can manage peak-load staffing, especially on critical projects.

Good KPO can improve the in-house research functions of small consulting firms by offering on-demand research support. This way, firms can spend more time on business-related activities and with their clients. The clients of small consulting firms will also value and appreciate the high-quality deliverables produced by KPO. With knowledge process outsourcing, small consulting firms can easily handle technology feasibility assessments, macroeconomic, thematic research, sustainability research, and business analysis. The same KPO provider can help in secondary or desk research, digital media intelligence, and in conducting the repetitive, back office aspects of a project.

Mistakes Done in Choosing Supply Chain Consultancy

A supply chain consultant will enable a business to have actionable market intelligence for proactive procurement. More procurement professionals are recognising the need to be able to know more about their procurement categories, suppliers, and supply chains. Knowledge in those matters will enable procurement specialists to be in a better position to proactively plan and act. With supply chain consultancy, the business can have cost-effective procurement intelligence solutions that can result in comprehensive, actionable, and critical information throughout the procurement life cycle. However, company owners are advised to proceed with caution when choosing a supply chain consultancy. Here are some of the most common mistakes company owners make when selecting a supply chain consultancy firm or service provider for their business:

• Hiring inexperienced consultants – Experience is important when it comes to understanding supply chains and the requirements of every business. Hence, company owners must make sure that they are hiring consultants with significant experience in offering supply chain and procurement consultancy services. Likewise, they need to make sure that the firm has worked with companies in their industry. That way, they can be confident that the consultants can easily understand their requirements and deliver what they need efficiently. Seasoned consultants are accredited and ISO 9001:2008 certified, and they have a highly-experienced management team that can work closely with every client throughout the cycle of a project.

• Choosing the cheapest supply chain consultancy service – Companies must get a proposal and a quote on the services from the consultants, but they should be careful not to choose the cheapest provider. They must compare different consulting firms and find out which one can provide the highest-quality services at a reasonable cost.
  
  
• Not understanding what supply chain consultancy can do for their business – Supply chain consultants can do more than merely give advice and tips to generate actionable insights and intelligence for category managers, chief procurement officers, and other stakeholders in a company. They can measure and benchmark the performance of incumbent suppliers, monitor the changes in procurement categories, ensure compliance requirements in supplier monitoring, and strengthen the company’s relationships with suppliers. Hence, it is crucial to know what the consultancy service can provide, so the company can make the most of it.