Transparent Sourcing: Using Procurement Technology to Identify Savings

Are You Ignoring Savings Opportunities?

When it comes to saving money on purchasing, transparency is key. Your team needs an open view into how much the essentials and the extras cost, so that you can make informed decisions and spot opportunities to save. Procurement technology like iTrade Insights can connect you with that knowledge, but to make an impact on your bottom line, you need to know how to use the information.

What Is Procurement Technology?

Procurement technology is a category of solutions designed to streamline traditional sourcing processes like data collection, order placement, and even vendor relationship management. Long gone are the days of manual sourcing processes. Now, many of the time-consuming procurement tasks of the past are automated. Solutions like iTrade Insights can connect professionals with all of the sourcing data they need at the click of a button while eProcurement platforms like OneSource simplify order placement.

Using Data to Understand Your Spend

If you’re seeking out savings through your sourcing strategy, you can start by understanding your spend at a granular level. Procurement analytics tools empower you to drill down into your spending patterns across categories, suppliers, and SKUs. This allows your team to:

• Identify vendor overlaps or redundancies across locations
• Detect category outliers where spend deviates from benchmarks
• Spot purchasing fragmentation across departments or locations
• Pinpoint high-spend items that may be ripe for renegotiation or substitution

With the right procurement technology, such as iTrade Insights, this intelligence is no longer siloed. Instead, it’s accessible in real time, enabling you to make better decisions, faster.

Compare and Contrast Programs

Are you using the right supplier programs for the right products and services? It’s hard to know unless you’re comparing programs like-for-like. This is one area that procurement technology can support your business’ goals.

A data analysis platform can help not only access how much you’re spending on a certain category, it can also provide access to the details of each order. When comparing programs, you’ll want to standardize:

• Product names
• Pack sizes
• Units of measure

Many platforms like iTrade Insights will even run side-by-side comparisons, standardizing this data for you automatically.

Plus, you can use your technology tools to monitor purchase-order fill rates and pricing consistency. This can help you determine which suppliers suit your business needs best.

Report Valuable Information to Your Teams

Some procurement technology platforms can generate automated, shareable reports that highlight key savings opportunities, flag compliance gaps across locations, and deliver insights specific to your team’s needs. You can then easily download and share these reports with the appropriate team members.

Are you seeking better alignment across locations? Sharing these reports with your local teams ensures alignment and can improve ordering processes that have become fragmented.

Use iTrade Insights for Your Purchasing Decisions

Ready to take control of your sourcing strategy? Supply chain management clients with Foodbuy Foodservice gain automatic access to iTrade Insights. Fill out our supply chain management interest form today.