A few days ago, in our post on how You’ve Negotiated but you still might not be realizing savings on marketing print, we pointed out two great guests posts by Santosh Reddy of GEP on how just throwing a problem over the wall to an expert doesn’t necessarily save you money — it just guarantees that someone else, namely the Print Management Company (PMC), makes money on your behalf.

Today, we’re going to point out another guest post by a GEP consultant, Sanyam Khurana. In his recent post on Spend Matters on Procurement Lessons for Small Businesses and Large Multinational Corporations, he notes that some strategies work well regardless of organizational size. Thus, if you are a small business that wants to get bigger, you should take take these lessons to heart and work on these strategies.

Flexibility

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Sourcing Innovation has been emphasizing the importance of the 3T’s to successful Supply Management — Talent, Technology, and Transition Management. Transition Management requires a lot of things, but above all else, flexibility as your organization needs to adapt to, and be in, a state of constant change, in order to navigate the ebbs and flows of today’s global economy.

Cost Optimization

Whether you’re buying 100 units or 100,000 units, you still have to make sure you’re paying the right price for the right product. Over paying by 10% is still overpaying by 10%, and with smaller budgets, and margins to work with, 10% is still a lot.

Supplier Rationalization

Whether you’re a 1 Million, 100 Million, or a 1 Billion dollar company, you still depend on your suppliers for your success. In Sanyam Khurana’s post, he gives the example of a bakery that requires raw material, namely flour, to produce its goods. If the suppliers don’t deliver, the bakery can’t bake its bread. Having the right suppliers that you can depend on through thick and thin is important regardless of organizational size.

Data Management

Not only does each of the above strategies require good data to be effective, but so do other organizational strategies. For example, you can’t optimize cost unless you know how much you are paying, how much you could be paying and the value you are getting. You can’t rationalize on the right suppliers unless you are keeping good performance metrics. And while you can always be flexible, there’s no point in being flexible unless you know the direction that you should be be flexibly moving in! Plus, in today’s economy, social media is often critical to marketing, sales, and advertising — and in order to focus on the right channels, you need data!

Data, data everywhere
And all the tables burst
Data, data everywhere
It can not get much worse!