Introduction Global sourcing is assuming a significant position in the procurement strategy of every company. With growing competition, companies are staring at thin profit margins. On the procurement front, many Asian countries are offering products at a cheaper rate than domestic markets. Low cost of labor and government support are enabling countries like China to manufacture products at competitive rates. Moreover, globally recognized quality standards followed by Chinese manufacturers help in maintaining high product quality. Lower procurement costs enable companies to increase their profitability. Now, most global product companies are procuring their product from China.
In global sourcing activity, supplier of the product is a key stakeholder. The quality of your product and its timely delivery depends on the supplier. For bulk production requirements, you may need to engage with multiple suppliers at the same time. This is also crucial in the case of procuring various product categories. But coordination with different suppliers can lead to a lot of complexity. While dealing with vendors from China, language barriers can exacerbate these issues. Varying delivery slots and variations in quality standards is a challenge for your business. Similarly, this can lead to cost escalations due to multiple shipping consignments.
Consolidated sourcing strategies can help companies overcome these hurdles. Supplier consolidation is a crucial step while we consider a consolidation strategy. In this blog, check out the details about supplier consolidation.
Procurement strategies assume a significant position in business growth. Quality and price are the two major factors that often guide the procurement process. However, while sourcing from China, you need to engage with numerous vendors for fulfilling your bulk requirement. The process of managing different vendors across multiple manufacturing clusters can be cumbersome. At this juncture, your company can adopt vendor consolidation. Supplier consolidation is a smart supply chain management strategy for minimizing complexity in the procurement process. In supplier consolidation, a company reduces the number of vendors that they depend on. During this consolidation process, they choose and select only the best vendors that add value to their business.
While working with few vendors, a company can focus more on its product strategy. Vendor consolidation is important from the perspective of quality also. Sourcing products from multiple vendors can affect quality standards. Eventually, this can lead to product rejections. While dealing with various vendors from China, language and cultural barriers also create issues. By deploying consolidated sourcing options, you can get a hassle-free procurement experience.
As a supply chain strategy, supplier consolidation is highly beneficial for your company. In a way, it is the best option for optimizing all your resources such as manpower, costs, and logistics. While working with companies in a different territory, a sourcing agent can devise consolidated global sourcing solutions for you. The various benefits of adopting a consolidated sourcing option are:
Procurement is a game of volumes. You can arrive at competitive purchase cost only when you order in bulk quantities. The same applies to global sourcing also. Vendor consolidation helps shortlist few vendors that suit your requirement. By doing so, you are not spreading your bulk product requirement across multiple vendors. Through this, an individual vendor gets a high volume order. With a large order, the vendor can use their machine and human resources optimally. This process optimization results in avoiding wastage and leads to considerable cost savings. Similarly, you have better control over the entire sourcing process while dealing with a small set of suppliers. While sourcing products from China, always work with a sourcing agent to chart out your vendor consolidation strategy.
While procuring from a foreign country, companies often worry about the quality standards. Even with the advent of global quality standards, complete adherence to these systems is still pending in many countries. Additionally, huge variations in product quality are observed when moving from urban clusters to rural manufacturing clusters. So it is always better to work with a small set of suppliers. In doing so, your team can effectively collaborate with these vendors to chart out exact specifications and quality requirements. By focusing on a few vendors, you can speed up the process of sample production. With this, your team has better control over quality monitoring activities.
Logistics and shipping occupy a major portion of the final product cost. Minimizing the shipping charges becomes a priority area for a company. Any minor fluctuation in freight charges makes a drastic change in the final product price. When you deal with multiple vendors, each of them needs to arrange separate shipping arrangements. For small product quantities, this translates into high shipping costs. By vendor consolidation, you can provide these few vendors with bulk product quantities. With these consolidated sourcing strategies, you can reduce shipping costs. If your vendors are in close vicinity, it is possible to club their product consignments together for shipping. There are domestic package consolidation agents that help you with this activity.
Product sourcing from a foreign territory requires a great deal of teamwork. The sourcing activity becomes a success only when your team can effectively collaborate with the personnel from the supplier team. With a huge difference in cultural factors, this is a challenging task. So it is always advisable to keep the number of vendors at a minimum level. When you limit the number of vendors, you can maintain a better relationship with them. Proper vendor management is very useful in obtaining the best quality products as per your requirement. In a long run, a strong company-supplier relationship is beneficial for your company in many aspects.
Lack of proper communication is the most common reason for product failures in the case of global sourcing. At every stage of sourcing, effective communication is inevitable. You need to make sure that the designers, engineers, and production executives all interact constantly throughout the process. This is crucial during initial design, sample procurement, and final production. Dealing with numerous vendors can be a daunting task for your team members. Without proper focus, this can lead to total product failure. Instead, adopting a vendor consolidation strategy helps your team in bringing out the best results. Over a period, it becomes easy for communicating your requirements when you deal with a small set of trustworthy suppliers.
Key Factors to Consider Before Supplier ConsolidationThe process of supplier consolidation is not an easy task. In supplier consolidation, you should evaluate your existing vendors based on multiple parameters. For existing suppliers, the evaluation can be based on past performance.
You can also consider new vendors as a part of your consolidated sourcing options. It is advisable to select vendors that specifically suit your production requirements and timelines. However, the preparation of a robust evaluation system is very crucial in this. It requires a lot of experience and domain expertise. Apart from this, a thorough understanding of the local production ecosystem is crucial. Check out the factors that you should consider before supplier consolidation.
In China, there is intense competition in the product manufacturing segment. With the advent of manufacturing hubs, you can get numerous product suppliers across the length and breadth of the country. But only a few suppliers might fit your specific production requirements. It is important to assess the supplier’s domain expertise before you consider them for a partnership. In the absence of proper domain expertise, you may end up with faulty products and time delays. A due diligence activity can help you in determining the experience in a particular industry segment. For this, a china sourcing agent can help you with all the necessary background works.
In global sourcing, a lot of your time and focus goes into the coordination of every activity with your supplier. When you carry out vendor consolidation, you are dependent on a few vendors. Even though it is beneficial, you should make sure that the existing vendors are capable of fulfilling your requirements. This is important in terms of both quantity and quality. Failure in gauging your supplier capabilities can severely limit your business growth. Before shortlisting your vendors, make sure to carry out necessary background checks. You can rely on a mix of online and offline methods to evaluate this. In most cases, a direct factory visit can be helpful. A sourcing agent based in China can support you in this activity.
In supply chain management, we often talk about hard costs. These are direct tangible costs. During vendor management, you come across numerous soft costs. The cost incurred on preparing invoices, payment process, payment reconciliation, and consignment tracking, etc belongs to this category. It takes a considerable amount of time and human resources for carrying out these activities. Vendor consolidation should consider these factors seriously. You can carry out a cost-benefit analysis regarding the optimal use of human resources for managing vendors. This is an important matrix for determining the ideal number of vendors for consolidation.
Vendor consolidation is a strategic decision for streamlining your activities. All vendor-related activities follow a mutually agreed contract and SLA (Service Level Agreement). As a buyer, you need to make sure that the contract terms are favorable to your company. By eliminating multiple vendors, you can have better control over these agreements. On the other hand, it is necessary to put strict clauses while having few vendors. Documenting your specific requirements in the contract can ensure better monitoring options. At times, before vendor consolidation, it is important to review existing SLAs.
How to Strategically Consolidate Your Suppliers? Being a major supply chain strategy, vendor consolidation can have a huge impact on your business profitability. As a result, a collaborative approach is necessary while executing this. It should balance your profitability as well as bulk product availability. You need to consider all factors before executing supplier consolidation. Any negligence in this regard can lead to constraints in bulk product availability in the future. A mix of due diligence and cost-benefit analysis can help in determining your consolidated sourcing strategies. While procuring from China, numerous sourcing agents offer consolidated global sourcing solutions.
The following step-by-step process can help you in the successful execution of supplier consolidation.
A thorough understanding of your product requirements and larger business goals is the first step in vendor consolidation. Charting an expected growth trajectory will help in determining your product portfolio. Based on this, you can devise the quality standards also. The goal-setting acts as the base for vendor consolidation. Once you are clear about your goals, it becomes much easier to filter vendors based on their capabilities. It brings in a sharp focus on various vendor management activities such as contract preparation, price negotiations, and monitoring.
After setting your procurement goals, you need to select the best vendors that fit your requirement. There is no shortage of suppliers in China. However, shortlisting the best suppliers is always a challenge. You can use a mix of primary and secondary sources to create a primary list. Use a set of basic criteria to prepare this list. Later segment your suppliers based on their core strengths and expertise. Further, the use of tools such as SWOT analysis helps create the shortlist of preferred suppliers. A sourcing agent can help you in conducting these activities.
Normally, most of the considerations in vendor selection boil down to cost competitiveness. In vendor consolidation, a detailed comparison of shortlisted vendors is essential. Along with vendor capabilities, cost comparisons are equally important. Spend analysis or a cost-benefit analysis can help in determining these comparative advantages. A review of the company’s purchase history can help in conducting a spend analysis. In this, you compare various costs associated while purchasing from multiple vendors. It also considers the time of purchase and quality expectations. Analysts rely on purchase orders, invoices, bills, and related data for carrying out spend analysis. Based on the results, you can choose the best suppliers for future orders.
As a key supply chain decision, any vendor analysis needs to go through a strict review process. It is advisable to form a team of stakeholders from different business verticals to review the analysis. The idea is to bring in maximum diversity in viewpoints. This is very helpful in understanding your business priorities clearly. You can also reach out to trustworthy experts/consultants outside your organization. A sourcing agent can support you in facilitating this review. The team of key stakeholders can become the backbone of your consolidated sourcing strategies execution. Involvement of your internal team members in the early stages of vendor consolidation is helpful during actual execution.
Vendor consolidation is not merely an analytical exercise. You should operationalize the strategies derived from vendor analysis. The first step is to cross-check the final results of your research. Beyond this, reach out to suppliers and understand their current offerings. Based on the analysis and vendor interactions, remove suppliers that seem to fall short of your expectations. Taking such a step is very crucial for your business while moving ahead. But ensure that you keep cordial relations with suppliers even in the absence of any business deals.
Once your organization is sure about the details of 3-4 vendors, take steps to transition towards proper consolidation. Provide appropriate orientation and training to your team members for prioritizing your business objectives. Later, work closely with the suppliers to revise your contracts as per the new requirements. With the reduction in the number of suppliers, your team will be in a better position to deal with them. It is crucial to monitor the key parameters to assess any visible improvement in your process outcomes. Throughout the process of supplier consolidation, a sourcing agent can help with the necessary resources.
Supplier consolidation is an excellent method to optimize your supply chain operations. However, a global sourcing activity involves a lot more complex steps. Global companies face numerous challenges while sourcing products from countries like China. A china sourcing agent can support your company in successful product sourcing. Many such agencies also offer consolidated global sourcing solutions.
Maple Sourcing is a leading global sourcing partner that helps companies to carry out procurement from China. With more than nine years of experience, the company offers excellent services in product procurement. A team of experts from Maple sourcing brings you a hassle-free sourcing experience. With a local presence in the Shenzhen area, the company can act on your behalf for all negotiation activities. Maple sourcing works with only high-quality verified manufacturers across China. Due to this, supplier consolidation becomes easier. The team at Maple sourcing is well-versed in English and Mandarin. They offer a wide range of services in product sourcing, quality control, process monitoring, etc. If you are planning to source products from China, do contact Maple sourcing today itself.