Strategic Sourcing

Find the right suppliers for your business and negotiate more effectively by automating your sourcing process.

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Are you looking for more value out of your procurement process through strategic sourcing?

Basware Strategic Sourcing empowers procurement and sourcing professionals to overcome business challenges and deliver against their goals of cost savings, spend control, and risk management. By automating and integrating sourcing activities, you can reduce the time required to identify and vet new suppliers (from weeks down to days) and collect more critical financial data. 

What is Strategic Sourcing?

Strategic sourcing is part of the procurement process that is responsible for identifying and contacting with suitable suppliers for the purchase of goods and services. Typically, in most organisations strategic sourcing covers the following steps:

  • Analysis of organisational spend to understand where and how money is being spent.
  • Identification of appropriate suppliers (who offers what) based on specific needs of the business.
  • Supplier negotiations (around price, service levels, delivery schedules etc) to maximise the value and minimise the total cost of procurement.
  • Handling the negotiation and contracting process with suppliers and managing the lifecycle of the contracts.
  • Implementation of sourcing initiatives with relevant feedback loops for continuous improvement and optimisation.

Strategic sourcing best practices include automating sourcing events, including the auction and RFX processes, leveraging electronic workflow tools to accelerate sourcing initiatives and participating in a business network to expand the reach to new and relevant suppliers.

Automation can help you better manage your strategic sourcing objectives and deliver the following benefits:

  • Increase savings and cost control by simplifying processes.
  • Streamline the entire bidding, negotiation and award process to drive efficiencies.
  • Increase spend under management and monitor contract compliance.
  • Create stronger supplier relationships and reduce supply chain risk.  

How Basware Can Help

Basware delivers end-to-end functionality covering all aspects of sourcing from eRFX and eAuctions to contract management and project management. Basware Strategic Sourcing helps procurement teams become a more strategic arm of the business by optimising how money is spent and unlocking access to exclusive innovation and savings that help set the company apart from the competition.

Drive Savings and Efficiencies

Automating your sourcing processes reduces manual work, lowers processing costs, and streamlines internal approval processes. Ultimately this translates to more cost savings with less effort. When you can easily initiate a sourcing event, tap into historical spending data and see market value of products, it's easier to make sure you're getting the best price and engaging in fact-based discussions with your suppliers.

Improve Spend under Control

Basware Strategic Sourcing offers a number of reports and dashboards, giving you better visibility across your spend. By increasing spend under management, you can ensure that all spending is compliant with contracts negotiated by the organisation. The reporting functionality makes it easy to monitor compliance rates to ensure stakeholders are leveraging existing contracts to fill business needs and avoid maverick spending.

Increase Supplier Collaboration

With a more streamlined sourcing process, your organisation will lower supply chain risk and cut transaction costs by nurturing more strategic supplier partnerships. Streamline your bidding, negotiation, and awarding processes and assemble, archive and organise supplier data with an overall simpler process. Suppliers can easily see what buyers are requesting and buyers can compare multiple suppliers' side-by-side.

“ISS has collaborated with Basware for many years to automate and increase both control and transparency... We are excited about the additional value strategic sourcing can provide us by forming a holistic source-to-pay process.”

Ken Vanhoegaerden, Reg. Supply Chain & Procurement Director, ISS World Services

Capabilities

eAuction Management

Conduct dynamic and organised negotiations with your suppliers to get the most out of your sourcing process. You can cater your auction types depending on what technique you believe best suits the suppliers involved. Basware Strategic Sourcing offers flexible auction formats and a quick and easy way to compare quotes, enabling you to choose a supplier faster, saving valuable time.

eRFX Management

Successful sourcing starts with organised and detailed information. With eRFx Management, you collect and evaluate detailed supplier information to support informed decision-making. Using a library filled with pre-approved templates and sample questions, Basware makes it easy for bidders and stakeholders to manage the RFx process and reduce cycle times.

Contract and Project Management

Easily view and manage contracts in a single, online central repository, with dashboard searching and reporting. Gain full visibility into all sourcing related project activities to properly allocate resources across sourcing initiatives and manage your entire contract lifecycle process.

Supply Base Management

Basware offers a single source of truth for a 360° view into your global supplier relationships. With configurable supplier registration form(s), buyer reviews, pre-approved workflows and supplier performance management capabilities that include questionnaires, scorecards and KPIs, Basware makes it easy to manage your supply base. Our supplier portal enables suppliers to manage their own profiles, documents, and contracts, and supports internal messaging between buyers and suppliers. All of this ensures faster supplier onboarding, improved supplier relations and a lower cost of supplier management.