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Using a strategic sourcing or outsourcing advisory consultant

By: Andy Henry

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Using a strategic sourcing or outsourcing advisory consultant
Strategic Sourcing and outsourcing advisory consultants are focused on assisting executives with the complicated task of planning and successfully completing an outsourcing project within their organisation. It involves a analysing processes that include a procurement process and evaluates and assesses purchasing activities within a company in a continuing way.
The main aim for such tasks is to assess the supply chain management and make changes which minimize supply chain costs.
Strategic Sourcing is focused on high level strategic business objectives and may include benefitial changes over and above the direct cost savings from the immediate outsourcing related changes. Achieving maximum cost, process and quality benefits can mean replacing technology, buying new systems or outsourcing complete technology based elements of a business as well as manual functions which benefit from centralisation or economies of scale and leverage a company's buying power.
Many terms are used to refer to sourcing initiatives, including off-shoring, near-shoring, near sourcing, sell-side, buy-side, supplier management, and can be at management level and focused on i.t outsourcing or rationalisation or at c-suite level bringing together large initiatives within a global organisation. Strategic sourcing involves a collaborative and continuous relationship between buyers and suppliers.
One of the major benefits to getting an external strategic sourcing advisory to help is that is significantly increases the visibility of the entire supply chain and enables management to get a clear audit of their situation and the facts about their current financial commitments while also creating cost savings and improved operational effectiveness.
The savings from strategic sourcing come from many areas and often highlight many ways that a company can improve spend consolidation, manage demand, improve internal and external processes, re-establish competitive bidding situations and develop relationships with internal and external suppliers.
Sourcing initiatives begin with an audit of the current situation and assessing a company's spending within the context of their industry and identifying the most suitable vendors and suppliers with respect to an overall coherent strategy. This can mean finding new suppliers that fit the new requirement, negotiating with existing suppliers, or creating new processes and structure within which to manage existing suppliers so that results of any changes can be assessed and the system modified to increase results.
Strategic sourcing advisories are there to offer significant existing experience in dealing with change management, bid processes, project management, outsourcing considerations and negatiations with suppliers and partners. This advice can be essential when a company looks to outsourcing for the first time and has limited internal experience of managing outsourcing on any significant scale.
Strategic sourcing advisory companies tend to have a team of very experienced industry professionals who have relationships and a successful track record or working at c-suite level to navigate the mine field on problems which an inexperienced company would run into when trying to achieve a successful outsourcing initiative on their own. Often these advisories have worked within fortune 500 and FTSE 500 companies with successful track records in managing complex sourcing initiatives at a strategic level where relationships and sourcing dynamics need to be completely understood.
When looking for a strategic sourcing consultant, check for senior executives with this experience to be sure of getting the right results on your outsourcing project and in the years following it.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Henry John writes about sourcing, outsourcing and strategic sourcing industry news. Visit www.elix-irr.com for more industry news.

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