Strategic Sourcing Europe

If you’re running behind short-term savings, working on the ‘strategic quadrant’ products and services might be painful. Indeed, don’t expect short-term results there and moreover, be aware this quadrant needs a lot of time and effort to be properly worked out. However, middle term results can be much more significant than any others and such, [...]

In a former post “CSR: A buzz like never before…” I have breifly described the topics covered by CSR. Below is a more extended list – a sample though – of the Economical, Environment, Working environment and Social criteria that would be to assess for a CSR rating purpose: Economical Criteria – Company structure and [...]

Here is a nice shortcut to find and see them all (almost) on one page, thanks to MSN: Search-MSN-images . If you try the same search on Goooogle, it simply doesn’t return any result. Enjoy!

I guess this speaks by itself. Below is a template that anyone can use to analyse TCO. Just keep in mind that TCO components may vary from one product to another. I beleive though that this template gives a good basis to start with.

In october last year, I’ve explained – shortly I admit, but with a nice exhibit – what a sourcing tree is (product / service categorisation). If I recon my stats about my popular posts, this is definitly one of interest. So, here is a more extensive example of a sourcing tree (which I used in [...]

In this article published on www.outsourcing-best-practices.com, you shall learn more about the best way to measure a supplier’s ability to provide the services you are looking for: asking references (supplier’s customers experience). Below are the 7 steps which are detailed in the article I mentioned: Step 1: Determining What Makes A Good Candidate Step 2: [...]

I have presented in the post SSOA III/IV how to prioritize SGs, depending on 1) the potential savings they could generate and 2) their easiness of implementation. The next and last phase is to define the implementation plan of your Strategic Sourcing program. There’s no obligation at all to translate your excel spreadsheet with SGs [...]

When the time comes to evaluate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a product/Service, it is better not to forget any critical element in the calculation of the Total Acquisition Cost (TAC). Here is a useful graph that might help, underlining as well the ‘usually forgotten’ elements. Click image to enlarge Case study example: [...]

In phase I/IV of a Strategic Sourcing Opportunity Assessment (see my HOWTO scope purchases post), you need to distribute your Sourcing Groups into 4 different categories (Standard, Commodity, Strategic, Bottleneck), depending their business impact and their supply-market-complexity. Below is a useful template to categorize each of your Sourcing Groups, based on the famous Porter’s 5 [...]

Are you using standard pre-qualification questionnaire (PQQ) to identify the most suitable suppliers to invite to tender for contracts?. PQQ, widely used in the Public Sector, was a strong recommendation on how public sector bodies can improve small & medium sized enterprises (SMEs) access to the Government marketplace. Actually, PQQ brings – if used properly [...]

The Sourcing Tree is a representation of a categorisation of your purchases. It’s a key component of a Strategic Sourcig approach and enables executing your spend analysis and project prioritisation. There’s nothing better than an example to explain what it is, so below is a sourcing tree (well, only a part of it) related to [...]