The Handbook of Market Intelligence: Understand, Compete and Grow in Global Markets, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14Market Intelligence for Supply Chain Management

INTRODUCTION

Case: Purchasing Dry Ice in Pharma Services

A buyer working for a pharmaceutical company was asked to issue an RFP (request for proposal) for dry ice – which is used in shipping bio-samples to labs to keep the shipments cold.

The buyer then attempted to determine who to invite to bid in the RFP:

• Google searches came up with companies that supply dry ice machines for making cloud effects at high school dances and Halloween parties.
• After asking the incumbent supplier who its competitors are, the buyer had three suppliers to issue the RFP to.
• In the end, the buyer discovered that there were numerous companies offering this service on the international scale, but this information arrived too late.

What the buyer would have needed in the first place was targeted Market Intelligence (MI) about the dry ice sector’s competitive landscape and the names of players. As a lesson learned, the company decided that, going forward, an extra amount of time and money would be set aside for comprehensive industry research in all sourcing projects where the spend would be more than $100,000 per year.

Supply chain management (SCM) experts claim that properly focused efforts to manage a firm’s supply chain create cost savings, which are better than any money spent on creating profits – think of this as 100% ROI (return on investment). It is thus in every firm’s interest to constantly keep costs in check.

Firms need to ...