At this point in time, very few people are still in the stone ages of Supply Management and buy on price per unit (PPU) alone, the first level of sourcing value. However, there are still a number of buyers in a number of organizations that still buy on landed cost or total cost of acquisition (TCA) and buy solely on the sum of price per unit, transportation, duty, tariff, temporary storage, and other costs that are incurred from the time an order is placed until the time the product is received. These organizations are still in the dark ages of Supply Management and need to find the light very, very quickly (especially with Trump Nation and Brexit on the way). And while most modern Supply Management organizations attempt to buy on total cost of ownership (TCO), the third level of sourcing value, not all succeed.
TCO is the most commonly used metric today by analysts, consultants, vendors, and (I’m sorry to say) bloggers alike. It is designed to be a comparative cost metric that quantifies the overall cost of each acquired unit from a direct, indirect, and quantifiable market perspective that takes a broader look at the cost of a product from an acquisition, utilization, and delivery perspective. In addition to the landed costs, it typically also considers indirect utilization, supplier switching, and transaction costs as well as cost adjustments for quality, waste, and brand power (if your supplier has a brand that increases the selling price of the product you create with the component).
TCO is designed to capture the ‘true cost’ of a product (or service) from a supplier and does a much better job of helping you to compare apples-to-apples when determining the best buy for your organization. And even though it’s not the ultimate metric, as that’s total value management (TVM), the next level (and pinnacle) of sourcing value measurement, you cannot apply TVM until you have mastered TCO (which is a big component of TVM just like total cost of acquisition is a big component of TCO), and you can’t master TCO until you can model it.
But most sourcing solutions don’t let you model TCO. And the few that do don’t let you optimize it. That’s why it’s important when selecting a strategic sourcing solution you get an optimization-backed solution with support for deep cost models and, preferably, bills of material. They might still be few and far between, but a few more hit the market in the past year, and we expect more will be coming due to the power, and utility, of such solutions.
So is TCO a no-go without optimization? Not necessarily, but it sure is a lot harder to do without optimization.