The Efficiency Value of a Marketplace Approach

Procurement talks a good game when it comes to efficiency. However, few are walking the walking when it comes to taking real action.

This is the second in a three-part series of posts. If you missed my first, ‘Instant Access to Supplier Information a Step Change for Procurement Productivity’, click here to read it.

In that post, I presented a challenge to anyone who assumes that having technology guarantees progress. Make sure your technology is earning its keep and not just putting your inefficient, manual methods online.

In this post, I’m going to take the same approach to efficiency.

What is Real Efficiency?

We talk a lot about efficiency in procurement, but we take very few steps to actually improve it. Real efficiency is more than doing more with less. It is also about timing. Sometimes, doing the same task at a different time increases the impact potential of the effort behind that task.

Take risk management or risk mitigation as an example. Addressing risk should be an active part of the sourcing process, not something to be managed afterwards. While risk information is readily available, sometimes what procurement really needs to know what their peers think of a supplier.

That is why tealbook combined internal supplier knowledge, data from Dun & Bradstreet, and aggregate intelligence from your industry peers into each supplier profile. Adding a peer view to the supplier discovery process not only makes it more robust, it significantly increases the trust factor for everything procurement learns.

Addressing risk early is critical. Two of the first opportunities procurement gets to mitigate risk arise during the supplier discovery process:

1. Inviting more qualified suppliers to participate in the sourcing process improves the final award decision.

You’re always going to lose some suppliers to disqualification or elimination. Investing in the discovery process up front decreases the fall-off rate, and ideally presents the team with a larger number of more qualified suppliers to negotiate with and consider for contracts.

2. Looking at supplier-related risk factors before the sourcing process begins makes it possible for procurement to push back on requirements if they are too confining.

Procurement tries to be good about collecting risk information in RFx’s, but many times it is too late to change the direction of a project based on what the team learns from suppliers.

By doing an early assessment of the available pool of suppliers and their relative risk before going to market, procurement creates an opportunity to widen the pool of prospective suppliers.

Making Efficiency Proactive

In addition to thinking about the timing of tasks and what impact that has on efficiency, procurement needs to look for opportunities to combine activities.

If you are going to conduct a supplier discovery exercise anyway, why not search a platform that incorporates third party risk data in addition to supplier information and buyer knowledge? tealbook incorporates D&B information into supplier profiles so procurement see which suppliers offer the product or service they are looking for in one place.

Taking efficiency to a more proactive level, why not pre-vet hundreds (or thousands!) of suppliers across a wide range of categories? With the right technology and information, procurement could, in essence, create a custom virtual marketplace of suppliers that are ready to bid at any given time.

A broad approach drives efficiency because the suppliers are already vetted and risk is moved up in the process without adding a step or a delay. This is an ideal application of technology because it enables something procurement can’t do on their own on the same scale.

Value creation goals notwithstanding, good procurement teams want competition as well. Without the supplier discovery pre-work being done, procurement is stuck with the same old suppliers time and time again.

And there is nothing efficient or strategic about that. Marketplaces are certainly not a new idea, but they are a path to efficiency that we should look for ways to improve.

Now that I’ve shared my point of view on scalable technology and marketplace efficiency, I’m going to wrap this series of posts with an optimistic view of procurement’s forward looking potential.