MNC Procurement made easy

Imagine this scenario: your boss asks you to get hold of 50 PC cameras and computer HDMI
cables for a regional meeting due to take place in the office in two weeks’ time. You’re
momentarily stumped at how to get such a large quantity of these items so quickly — and
not to forget meeting the budget criteria as well. But you gather your wits, open your internet
browser and enter a bookmarked website.

Most of us enjoy shopping, but procuring supplies for corporate purposes? Not so much.
Procurement for MNCs can be a very complicated and drawn-out process, but it doesn’t
have to be. For us at SourceSage, we’ve had our share of painful experiences to understand
the gaps in the system and motivate us to smoothen the kinks. From squinting at
spreadsheets of supplier names to painstakingly getting various departments to sign
approvals, we’ve been through it enough to know what needs to change.

• Limited Offering of Products
  Right at the top of the list of procurement issues has to be the physical limitations of one’s access to the product market out there. Sometimes, it can be really difficult to find the products you want due to the limited offerings from a short list of pre- approved vendors that have passed the KYC criteria as part of the onboarding process. In this case, we would run into the situation of needing to punch out and outsource our orders in an external environment. This means going through the process of getting a new supplier approved, and every procurement officer knows that curating a robust list of reliable suppliers is one of the toughest parts of the job, especially when you have to bear the burden of the risk of untrustworthy suppliers.
   
• Getting the right price
  Those of us in procurement know the biggest procurement risk has to do with price
  transparency. When we’re dealing with multiple suppliers to secure our purchases,
  the risk of unregulated pricing increases especially when there’s a lack of a
  centralised system. The difficulty of tracking petty cash spending leads to an increase
  in maverick spending which no procurement officer wants to deal with.
   

• Maintaining records

  Keeping track of procurement activities to comply with your company’s audit and
  compliance standard is no mean feat. The administrative paperwork (or even the
  digital version of it) alone can be a real chore. Filing records of payments and
  inventory is another laborious task that takes up too much of our time for non-digital
  transactions. Ideally, an electronic system that captures all transactions digitally
  would save a lot of hassle. At the same time, the need for petty cash can be
  minimised helping to reduce maverick spending significantly, all in all contributing to
  a fail-proof procurement system.
   

• Tedious approval processes
  Approval, approval, approval — it’s all part and parcel of the MNC life. The hierarchy
  of approval as part of the check and balance becomes a real roadblock when you
  have to get several Approving Officers to approve your order. While the number of
  personnel you have to go through to get your order approved varies according to the
  value of your purchase, one thing is constant: the tedious process of waiting for
  approvals, sometimes with the need to go back-and-forth several times.

While all these negative experiences do exist, there’s another side to the procurement world.
The luckier ones among us may have won the game of chance and worked with reliable
suppliers with a widespread catalogue of items, or perhaps your company has a digitalised
system to reduce the manual labour needed to keep track of purchases.
The question then is how do we increase the odds of catching a lucky break and not having
to rely on chance to conveniently procure the products we need from a trusted supplier?
Our short answer is, the platform already exists. We wouldn’t be describing the best-case
scenario to you if we didn’t already know it’s tested and proven. And you won’t just be
hearing it from us as we have use cases to prove that it works. Companies have already
tried the platform and benefited from it.

At SourceSage, we’ve worked with a number of MNCs. One of those that successfully
utilised a customised procurement platform with us is an international logistics company.

The value that SourceSage has added to that company's procurement system is threefold.
Firstly, we’ve broadened the variety of products on their marketplace by aggregating
individual sellers as well as sellers from third party marketplaces such as Amazon, Lazada
and Shopee.

The sheer number of items we add also brings about the second benefit which is cost
savings. By increasing the size of the market, we also help to increase price competitiveness
so that an employee who is looking to procure is able to get their desired item at a price
that’s as close to market rate as possible.

Thirdly, SourceSage goes the extra mile by filling in the gaps when a platform user is unable
to find a product they want on the product catalogue. In such cases, SourceSage steps in to
do every step of the product sourcing cycle, from locating, verifying and onboarding the
supplier to placing the product order and settling the manual work. An employee would not
need to punch out to another platform to complete the procurement and hence run the risk of
not capturing the transaction in the system — one of the common issues that leads to
inefficiencies in the system.

Ready to turn the bad experiences into positive ones? We’re just a few clicks away.
Schedule a chat with us or find out more about us on our website. Working with us means
you’ll be joining the likes of DBS bank, Mitsui & Co. , who have built successful
eCommerce platforms with us. We’re ready to help you build yours when you are.