It is essential in today’s market to make sure that your goods stack up, that your customers are excited and happy and that you can meet their needs at all times. You must have a ready and uninterrupted supply, helping generate brand loyalty, meeting your targets and maximising profits. There are many different strategies you can employ to help reach these goals with sourcing and a sourcing organisation can be a key choice to take your goods from concept to customer. Here we will look at some of the consumer goods procurement strategies you can use to gain and maintain satisfied customers.
Implement procurement software
Leverage technology and replace manual processes with automation. Tasks that are much more susceptible to human error are best upgraded and replaced with new, innovative software thus eliminating any inefficiencies. This can help streamline your processes from end to end. There are various software programs available on the market, so it is important to do your research and find one that will work best for your specific needs. You should also consider how user-friendly the interface is, as this will make a big difference in how quickly your team can adapt and start using the software to its full potential. Kissflow is a good example. Expect better Vendor Management, approve and track purchase requests with ease and keep clients happier with automated workflows, as you will simply have more time.
Analyse spend and determine business needs
You want to analyse your organisational spend and identify any potentially overlooked areas where additional and unnecessary costs may be incurred. Following that, take the time to design a robust procurement strategy build on fact-based and actionable data. Once the spend has been analysed, it will be much easier to identify the needs of the business. You can then work on tailoring a procurement strategy that meets these specific needs and helps to control costs. This involves looking at what is being bought, how it is being bought and who is buying it.
Sourcing
Sourcing, or the locating, negotiating and agreeing of contracts with all of the key producers and sellers of the goods and parts that you need, is a central and critical component of any business. Sourcing can of course be done in house or using sourcing organisations to do the running around and dealing for you, and while the former was previously the more popular choice, using professionals to procure your goods and vendors for you can maximise you time and results with minimal effort.
While sourcing has long been seen as a core but fairly behind the scenes part of business, in the ever changing current climate with wars and all the other ways that your supply chain can be interrupted, utilising the knowledge and expertise of a sourcing organisation can bring you stability and security making it well worth the investment.
It is necessary to be sure of suppliers today, both in terms of reliability meeting an increasing demand at a moment’s notice and in quality and ethics. People are more and more aware of sustainability concerns, the environment and human rights which should all be reflected in your goods and their sources. A sourcing agency has the in depth knowledge and expertise to not only ensure good and steady supply chains in all eventualities but has put the time and research in to find the correct partners for you. This will save money in the short term training up and achieving this same level and experience in house and also in the long run helping you find the best deals and terms to improve your margins and make a greater profit.
Build an adaptive supply chain
Traditionally the focus when building a supply chain was rather narrow, using what you need to quickly and cheaply make the best product you could without much room for error. Now it is important to be flexible, with an adaptive supply chain that takes into account the possible and perhaps even probable issues that can arise both internally and externally to affect your supply.
Using advanced supply chain management techniques, you can create a network that is adaptive and reacts and responds quickly to any circumstance and guarantees a constant delivery of goods.
With pressure from disruptions and the inability to get certain parts and products to and from different parts of the world comes loss of sales and customers, while if your goods are available and reliable then you can build up the brand loyalty which is so important in a competitive market and keep hitting your profit targets. From identifying and isolating exactly who your partners are and should be and forging these deals through to automated and resilient processes in place to take over when there is a problem, your modern and complex supply chain should be able to stand up to whatever will be thrown at it in an ever-changing and disruptive world, giving surety of supply and keeping your customers happy.
Avoid Market Cannibalization
Stepping slightly away from procuring goods through sourcing, an important strategy to avoid in your business is market cannibalization. This occurs when a company starts to lose sales from one of its older and established products in favour of a new product that is too similar. Essentially you are hitting the same market of consumers and still only getting their business once when you should be aiming each new product at a new group of customers to maximise profits.
Further, the launching of this new product, with its marketing, creation and all of the other costs only to take away from an existing product that has already had this money spent and has its own customers means that you have hurt your bottom line, appealing to people that you have already reached. You should constantly be checking each of your products to make sure that cannibalization is not occurring, and weigh up any potential cannibalization when opening a new location or launching a new item.
Conclusion
There are many different strategies you can utilise for the procurement of goods in a reliable and consistent way, as well as to hit different markets, avoid market cannibalisation and gain brand loyalty through reliability and transparency. Using a sourcing organisation that already has all of the relevant experience and expertise in an area of the world or with a type of product will help you maximise profits while also giving your customers the best and most innovative products and at the best price regardless of what else is going on in the world. Possessing a flexible and adaptive supply chain, as we have seen in recent times, is the key to always having access to everything you need to keep your customers not only happy, but blown away.
