What is Strategic Sourcing?

Regardless of the size of your business or supply chain, if you receive your merchandise and inventory from deliveries, you will benefit from creating a strategic sourcing plan. Having a strategic sourcing plan put in place will help you pay more money to the bottom line, and get you in the habit of managing your costs as your business continues to grow. Below are some of the most common questions you may come across related to strategic sourcing.
 
What Is Strategic Sourcing?
Strategic sourcing is the process of continually analyzing and evaluating your purchase activities for your essential merchandise and inventory. This helps you to ensure that the prices you are paying are competitive while maintaining the brands and quality of products you required to operate properly. Strategic sourcing is most often utilized for supply chain management, or in services and capital.
 
What Are The Primary Goals Of Strategic Sourcing?
The primary goals of strategic sourcing are to reduce costs and create more efficient operations. As your business continues to grow, the strategies you use may no longer be sufficient to meet your needs. By tracking market trends and spending patterns, you can identify areas of opportunity to ensure that you have the frequency of deliveries you need, and the amount of inventory all at the same time. When creating your strategic sourcing plan, for example, you my may find that it is more cost-effective to order some items in bulk during your busy season than in smaller quantities.
 
Are Vendor Costs The Only Consideration When Creating A Strategic Sourcing Plan?
While your initial focus may be on the price of your merchandise and inventory, there are many factors that should be taken into consideration. An essential factor is the logistics of your operations, and the logistics of your freight delivery provider. By finding a delivery provider that loads and unloads their trucks in an efficient manner, you can maximize the time it takes to receive your delivery. One company that can help is Ratelinx, which offers an exceptional software application to warehouses and supply chains. Ratelinx LTL sourcing strategies are designed to save business both time and money by electronically analyzing data and creating comprehensive reports.
What is Strategic Sourcing?
How Often Should You Revisit Your Strategic Sourcing Plan?
Your strategic sourcing plan should be a constant work in progress. As software, tools, and technology continue to advance, you need to ensure that your plan is being managed with the most up-to-date and current methods of planning. Even the most well thought out plans will have occasional bottlenecks and room for improvement. By analyzing your market trends and merchandise and inventory costs on a regular basis, you can avoid financial losses created by inaccurate ordering.
 
Strategic sourcing is a highly analytical process, which requires extreme attention to detail. By utilizing specialty software, the process of analyzing your most recent data will be faster to gather, and easier to comprehend. To ensure consistency, each warehouse and supply-chain should have a designated person or group assigned to the task of strategic sourcing.