Retail Procurement Challenges: Why They Happen & How To Beat Them

Procurement teams, we feel your pain. It’s hard to find reliable suppliers that can provide goods to meet your needs at fair prices.

Real hard.

You’re constantly worrying about roadblocks and blind spots that can dramatically slow down your department–and in turn, your business. As a result, informed decision-making and having a clear strategy are more important to your success than ever before.

We put together this post to take a closer look at some of the most common challenges affecting your team, why they happen, and how you can overcome them.

Risk Mitigation 

Identifying and managing risk will always be a huge part of the procurement process. Without the right tools and processes in place, you risk increased costs, compromised quality, delivery issues, and time lost searching for critical information. That’s why it’s important to have defined and automated (where possible) processes in place for purchases and payments. Additionally, having a platform that centralizes your data and enables visibility goes a long way in helping you manage and prevent procurement risk–allowing you to save costs and avoid significant setbacks in the future. 

Lack of Real-Time Visibility

There are a ton of moving parts within your supply chain so it’s no surprise that issues arise when you don’t have real-time visibility into the orders you’ve placed. Without that foresight, it’s also difficult to know when a product is set to arrive or when changes were made to a given order. By taking advantage of real-time visibility, you’ll be able to turn your procurement data into valuable, actionable insights and enable real-time adjustments through order status visibility at the line-item level so you’re better prepared when delays or disruption strike.

Inaccurate Data

Informed decision-making is a huge part of the procurement process. But without accurate and reliable data, accomplishing that on a consistent basis becomes increasingly difficult. In fact, if you’re using inaccurate data it can lead to a myriad of problems including inventory shortages (or excess), short or over ships, and other procurement roadblocks that can end up costing your organization significant money. That’s why it’s critical to bring together all multi-enterprise data into a single platform. This will empower you to harness information that’s scattered throughout multiple systems to create a single version of the truth–and keep your team making better-informed decisions using the most accurate data available.

Supplier Performance Issues

You rely on having an efficient process and a reliable selection of quality products. But how do you ensure it remains consistent? You need to have a way to track vendor performance–and that’s where supplier compliance programs come in. Their value can’t be understated when it comes to having an efficient, just-in-time supply chain that you can count on having the right product at the right place at the right time. Additionally, having a way to communicate with your suppliers in real-time on critical supply chain data also makes the supplier management process that much easier.

Outdated Technology

Depending on outdated technology and/or manual processes is like having a predator lying in the weeds, just waiting to strike. It’s going to come back to bite you sooner or later. The predator? Those complex processes that you thought were so easy at first. And here’s the thing–many organizations view adapting new technology as a burden when it’s the exact opposite. By leveraging a platform and a partner that’s a best-fit for your team and your business, you’re making your procurement operation more efficient, centralizing data, and creating immense value for your organization.

The good news is that there’s hope for procurement professionals if you have the right data platform.

How Syncrofy Can Help Power Your Procurement Team

Since Syncrofy brings all multi-enterprise data together into one platform, creating configurable scorecards on supplier performance has never been easier. As a result, you’ll be able to identify your highest performing suppliers so you can do more business with them and work with the least efficient ones to improve their performance. Having this tool at your fingertips will enable you to achieve accurate, actionable, and more productive relationships with your suppliers overall.

Syncrofy also gives you the power to view the status of your orders at the line-item level (acceptance, fill rates, lead times, short ships, over ships, and change orders) so you can make adjustments on the fly and never miss a beat. You can also view advance ship notice status at the line item level, so you’ll never be left in the dark again when it comes to how much of your order will arrive and when. And because you know when to expedite or fulfill product requirements with other sources, you’ll dramatically reduce the risk of having a stockout.

With everything you’ve got going on in procurement, it helps having a smart platform by your side. In fact, with Syncrofy’s SLA exception functionality you’ll be alerted when orders fail to be acknowledged within a given time frame. That’s a huge win for you when it comes to operational efficiency gains and risk avoidance.

Learn more about Syncrofy…

Syncrofy is a multi-enterprise data platform that enables transparency, intelligence, and automation across supply chain networks. Designed with non-technical users in mind, Sycnrofy provides full supply chain visibility and actionable insights from day one—no need to configure, map, or develop a specialized data warehouse. It calculates fill rate and lead time for both orders and shipments and reconciles invoices against POs, shipment documentation, and receipts to identify quantity and price discrepancies. 

To learn how Syncrofy can help you take back control over your supply chain, visit www.coenterprise.com/solutions/syncrofy_supply_chain/