General posts and articles which do not fit anywhere else.

How to Improve your RFP – Part 4

Part 4 of 4 on Improving your RFP

Yes, there are plenty of challenges when generating a RFP and the objective of this series is on how you can improve your document  and how can we make this task easier for you as a Buyer?

I wish there was an easy answer, however, with the exception of hiring a third party professional there is no easy way around this. Yes, you can hire someone to create or write your RFP’s! Sign me up right, as I for one am not a big fan of writing them from scratch which is why we started offering our forms to Buyer’s and Supplier’s that have similar sentiments.

First, few companies have the desire or the budget to hire third party professionals and second when you outsource it does defeats the purpose of developing your role as a Purchasing Professional.  And last, your boss might ask what you were hired for…not good!

  1. You can improve your RFP’s simply by improving your (more…)

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Purchasing’s Role in the Supply Chain

There are many areas of responsibilities in the supply chain. For example, a purchasing department might have positions for a secretary, an analyst, an inventory control clerk, buyer(s), contract coordinator, audit, quality control, transportation, logistics, warehouse, shipping, receiving and more. Depending on your company size you might be responsible for some or all of the above job functions!

Purchasing can no longer be stuffed into a dark corner with a phone, fax and internet connection. In other words, it is no longer considered an isolated function. It must work closely with both internal and external clientele. Internal would be your user groups and external would be your suppliers. For the supply chain to be effective and achieve a competitive edge all these pieces must work closely together.

Lets break down all those above job functions into two groupings.

1)    Logistics
–    The incoming movement of goods from the source (the supplier) to your operation
–    Inventory – management of stock levels, warehousing and storage
–    Distribution of stock items to your user group or customers

So transportation, warehouse, shipping, receiving, inventory control all appear to fit category #1

2)    Purchasing
–    Procurement of goods and services
–    Contracts and commercial terms
–    Vendor Management

Purchasing buyers, contract coordination, audit, quality might more fit category #2

Many in purchasing would (more…)

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More RFQ Tips

Part 2 This post is a continuation of Part one of our RFQ Tips segment. A RFQ is all about the competitive bidding process however competitive bidding is no guarantee…

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