Maximizing E-Procurement Efficiency: The Power of Best Practices

Does your company use them and why you should care?

According to Wikipedia best practice asserts that there is a technique, method, process, activity, incentive, or reward that is more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique, method, process, etc.

So, when a company indicates to you that they use best practices, does this mean they are supporting what is the best practice for an entire industry like retail or health care or  for a product offering like e- procurement tools?

I do not believe that best practice is just following a standard way of doing things that can be conducted by multiple organizations. A best practice is a  process lifecycle that must evolve over time as tools, industries, and businesses, change.

If one uses best practices, should the net result not be an ideal state that a person or an organization set out to achieve in the first place? In fact, if the process used is actually a best practice shouldn’t all of a company’s customers use the same process? I’m not sure that this is ever a question one asks when looking for a referral about a company’s service offerings. Example: Please tell me about your companies’ best practice. Are they consistent and conducted each and every time to the desired result? Can you tell me the desired result?

One way to ensure superior quality results is to provide templates that can be iterated and are evaluated at the completion of each use and changed when needed. This then requires usage by other customers in order to ensure the integrity of the process. This practice elevates the actual process beyond just a buzzword and moves a particular process in the direction of becoming a best practice that drives equivalent results on a consistent basis.

A question that I use quite often with potential new clients is to ask how often they source a particular category. As an example, lets’ take  the waste management category. How often do you source it? Typically, the answer is every two or three years. This is logical as long-term contracts carry additional benefits. However, there may be key learnings and adjustments to the category that evolve or impact the category annually. At SafeSourcing we may source the category a dozen times a year. This means we have sourced and adjusted our white glove service and templates more than twenty-five times before your company sources the category again. As the economy becomes more circular, the need for adjustments becomes critical to sourcing success..

We will continue to call our white glove managed service  and e-procurement offerings high quality process techniques focused on continuous improvement that deliver anticipated results. Our goal will continue to be to save our customers as much money as possible in the shortest period of time possible while also improving quality and mitigating risk. We continue to believe that is the best practice of all.

SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay Managed Service Provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions all delivered as a white glove service that are part of our SafeSourceIt™ family of products.