Strategic Sourcing and Procurement

Strategic sourcing is all about the process by which organizations procure goods and services and manage key parts of their supply chain. Effectively managing what, how many, and from whom you buy can have a dramatic impact on overall profitability. That’s why strategic sourcing and procurement can have such a big impact.

For more than 20 years, Carpedia has helped companies transform their strategic sourcing process, reduce associated costs, and improve service reliability and delivery performance.

Delivering Improved Performance

After we gain a thorough understanding of your existing inventory, procurement, and vendor management processes, we help you evaluate your strategic procurement options for improved performance. Working with your management team, we typically identify opportunities in one or more of the following areas:

• Procurement order management processes
• Alternate sourcing and price negotiation
• Vendor consolidation and management
• Inventory management and lot sizing
• Business unit coordination and demand management

Discovery & Analysis

Understanding Your Unique Situation

Our process begins by analyzing your current sourcing requirements and practices. We examine how you develop sourcing strategies, select vendors, negotiate, order, and manage supplier performance. We then complete value stream mapping to understand your:

• Workflows
• Lead times
• Inter-department roles and dependencies
• Cycle times

We also analyze your current strategic procurement metrics and determine how well they align to the key performance drivers of your business and to your overall business strategy.

Identifying Improvement Opportunities

Once we identify the sourcing performance gaps that need to be addressed, we work with your managers to improve existing procurement processes. We also help develop and refine performance planning and scheduling systems, and vendor management tools.

Developing Control Systems

To ensure that the changes become ingrained in how sourcing is managed, we develop operating reports to track indicators such as purchase price variance, supplier performance, schedule attainment, and quality.

Implementation and Sustainability

We work shoulder-to-shoulder with your managers to make the changes real. Of course, without the adoption of proper control systems and new behaviors, performance improvements can be short-lived. To make certain these improvements are sustainable, we provide frontline leaders with the coaching, training, and tools required to move procurement to a higher level of performance while keeping the group aligned to the strategic and operating objectives of your business.