Companies around the world are finding that purchasing, with its
associated business processes, organization structures, and
technologies, holds the key to not only achieving significant
performance improvement but also transforming the global inbound supply
chain into a competitive advantage. This interest in purchasing is
driven not only by the potential for significant savings but also by the
rapid time frame in which savings can be achieved.
The modern 21st century company faces an increasingly complex, globally
competitive business environment with significant product-fulfillment
and supply chain challenges. Companies are looking for ways to meet
these challenges by uncovering and achieving sustainable year-over-year
cost savings, developing new markets, and expanding their global reach.
Companies around the world are finding that purchasing holds the key to
achieving significant operational and financial performance improvements
that can help support asset reallocation to capital-intensive projects
and improve long-term stakeholder value.
The Supply Chain and Operations Management practice of LSM Consulting
offers a suite of purchasing solutions that help leverage some of the
opportunities in purchasing, from both strategic and
operational/transactional efficiency perspectives.
An
initial diagnostic effort is used to analyze purchasing operations and
identify opportunities for improvement based on respective/relative
performance against process, organizational and technology focused best
practices. This is typically a 6-8 week project that provides
comparative performance measures, defines a high-level roadmap for
purchasing improvement, estimates the potential benefits of these
improvement projects, and identifies “quick hit” opportunities that can
deliver immediate value with minimal investment.
The Purchasing solutions suite provides follow-up performance
improvement and technology-enabled process management and comprises the
following elements:
Efficient replenishment develops and implements transactional
processes and systems that deliver responsive, efficient replenishment
of materials, goods, and services.
E-Purchasing delivers Web-enabled
purchasing process and technologies.
Decision-support tools deliver
enterprise information to buyers' desktops to support strategic
purchasing activities.
Supplier management
programs
helps ensure that processes and technologies are in place to manage
and support strategic supplier relationships over time.
Global strategic
sourcing
is a systematic fact-driven process aligned with the overall business
objectives of a company.
Commodity strategy
implementation
emphasizes rapid achievement of benefits in focused, under-leveraged
commodity areas.
