Strategic Sourcing
PowerAdvocate offers customers a wide range of services to help develop an efficient, sustainable, go-to-market approach and manage category spend to deliver savings. From strategic planning to execution of sourcing events, PowerAdvocate helps to streamline processes, save time and save money all while demonstrating prudency.
- Opportunity Assessments
- Category Management
- Sourcing Execution
- Cost Risk Assessment
- Supplier Relationship Management
- Supply Chain Transformation
- Demand Planning
Opportunity Assessments
PowerAdvocate develops high-level opportunity assessments to identify potential savings opportunities by category. We approach each category in terms of spend, number of suppliers, commodity drivers, market conditions and recent wins.
This enables PowerAdvocate to identify the top categories best suited for a detailed analysis and bring to light areas for potential consolidation strategies or for planning to hedge against commodity cost volatility.
Category Management
PowerAdvocate provides category market insight and best practices to manage your line of business. Our category deep dive approach creates an action plan to help category managers identify and attain category savings by applying best practices with real-time supply market data.
Our category analysis provides category market trends; supplier information; labor, material, or equipment benchmark comparisons to customer rates and or costs; custom spend reports; and opportunity analysis, along with recommendations to improve category value.
The Category Management functionality as part of Market Intelligence has improved not only how our organization views, presents, and shares information, but it’s also enabled our buyers and category managers to devote more time to strategic vs. tactical efforts…”
- Director of Strategic Sourcing
Sourcing Execution
With solid data, opportunities identified and strategies developed, PowerAdvocate can support your go-to-market approach and deliver savings. PowerAdvocate “supercharges” procurement teams through a combination of cost savings specialists and best-in-class sourcing tools.
At PowerAdvocate, we are also intimately aware of the requirement to be well integrated with technical and project management stakeholders throughout this process. We work with energy companies to accelerate and improve the actual execution of the RFx bid events by performing them on our Sourcing Intelligence® platform. We often fully integrate with customer teams to effectively execute against the sourcing wave plans.
Our strategic sourcing team is now recognized as a model and sought-after training resource for the larger enterprise.”
- Vice President, Supply Chain
Cost Risk Assessment
PowerAdvocate takes a holistic approach to cost risk allowing you to better manage what you are buying (price, quality, and availability) and from whom you are buying in order to deliver and sustain savings.
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Create cost models on equipment or services up to categories and overall projects which provide you transparency into cost drivers
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Forecast impact on materials or services that you are working to procure
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Strengthen your negotiations with third party Cost Intelligence data which you can customize to meet your specifications
Supplier Relationship Management
PowerAdvocate works with customers to create a Supplier Relationship Management program of existing suppliers to measure and manage performance and risk. Performance may include straight-forward, easily-identifiable measures (such as on-time delivery or invoicing), or less easily quantifiable aspects of performance (innovation in service delivery to reduce costs or speed delivery of capital projects).
Risk may include many types of controllable and uncontrollable risk. Our consultants develop a customized program organized around the type of supplier and supplier objectives for measuring and managing performance on an ongoing basis, and a strategy for collecting information, whether collected from external sources, key internal stakeholders, or suppliers themselves.
The key component to any successful SRM program is to make it a repeatable process.
Supply Chain Transformation
Our transformational services focus on centralizing processes and combining strategic sourcing best-practice approaches with sustainable results through our knowledge transfer and technology. We often find the first step is to centralize spend across all categories.
With the complete spend analysis, our customers gain visibility across all spend, allowing them to locate spend and contract synergies. Our sourcing experts then work closely with our customers to evaluate the selected categories from the opportunity assessment phase, and determine the sourcing strategies necessary to capture value (e.g., category profiles, RFP design and execution, agreement design and execution, contract performance monitoring).
Our expertise, collaborative training, and skills transfer develop sustainable strategic sourcing organizations capable of identifying and delivering on savings opportunities.
Demand Planning
PowerAdvocate develops forward looking demand plans that take into account current capital projects plans and expected asset maintenance activities over that period. The demand plans are developed using historical spend information, existing project planning documents, and any additional documentation that exists internally to our customers regarding expectations for future capital and operating activities.
The goal of the demand plan is to:
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Develop comprehensive plan for future spend
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Highlight potential challenges to achieving spend goals
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Identify areas of potential over or under investment
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Note areas where additional capital or personnel are required to meet needs
Strategic Sourcing Effort to Meet CFO Mandate SituationAfter the major housing market collapse in 2008 destroyed revenues, a large energy company needed to cut costs. Nobody owned spend, which turned out to be a big problem when CFO mandated significant cost reductions across the enterprise. ApproachPowerAdvocate provided to tools and expertise needed to identify enterprise-wide spend and gain visibility across categories and suppliers.
ResultsIn two years time, the client was able to transform from a fragmented tactical-responsive organization with no ownership of spend to a center-led organization, partnering with the business units and using analytics to drive decision making. The client has successfully identified and executed upon the CFO mandated savings target.
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