e-Procurement: From Strategy to Implementation

Strategic Sourcing

Over the past decade, particularly, one of the ways that companies were encouraged to overcome a myopic focus on price and to concentrate on true costs was strategic sourcing, which in many ways amounted to little more, at times, than vendor rationalization. These efforts at strategic sourcing are predictable—survey purchasing categories, trawl through the company’s purchasing history in order to create a list of the vendors currently being used, reduce the number of suppliers, and then renegotiate prices with the remaining preferred vendors—if not always sustainable, and have been notoriously ineffectual over the long run. Specialist needs, new discount offers, friendly sales representatives, and urgent spot buys soon meant ...