STRATEGIC SOURCING & PROCUREMENT

Archstone Consulting provides a holistic set of services to help its clients drive maximum value from its sourcing, procurement and supply management functions.  Specific services include: 

Procurement Transformation
Realizing the full value of a strategic supply management approach often requires a transformation of a company's procurement process.  Archstone Consulting offers an integrated approach to redesigning the strategies, processes, organization and supporting technologies needed to create a world-class, strategic supply management capability.

Procurement Staff Augmentation
Archstone Consulting provides experienced consultants to assist our client’s procurement and sourcing initiatives on a month-to-month basis with no management overhead.  Our consultants have significant procurement and sourcing expertise, and are able to work independently and seamlessly within the procurement group and across the organization to enable change.  All the while, our consultants are able to access the Archstone Consulting resource pool to gather needed best practices, benchmarks, templates, and other value added enablers. 

With the need to continuously reduce costs and the challenges of finding and retaining procurement talent, our clients are demanding a new solution – procurement staff augmentation is our answer.

Spend Analysis
Many organizations struggle to capture, let alone manage, their entire enterprise-wide external spend, yet virtually every organization is tasked with reducing it. The most common spend analysis / reduction approach has been: take a quick “spend snapshot,” conduct a static analysis, and identify a litany of focused external spend reduction initiatives, then repeat this process every three years or so. As organizations continue to make strategic acquisitions and expand their operations domestically and globally, transitioning to a dynamic, detailed continuous spend analysis capability is critical to capture and sustain external spend reductions.

Our systematic approach is focused on three key objectives:

• Consolidate Spend Data: Spend data frequently resides in multiple, disparate systems. Creating common spend categories and common “category hierarchies” will help create a single, consolidated dataset from which targeted spend reduction opportunities and management reports can be drawn.
• Maximize Purchasing Power: Vendors frequently have more accurate spend information than the organizations they serve. Enterprise-wide spend visibility invariably generates more purchasing power at vendor negotiation time. Organizations often have multiple, fragmented supply arrangements with the same vendor or duplicate relationships across the enterprise without incorporating the enterprise-wide volume into negotiations.
• Improve Contract Compliance: Off contract, or “maverick”, buying results in organizations losing pre-negotiated front-end discounts as well as back-end rebates or other volume inducements. Advanced Spend Analysis enables companies to identify, monitor, and address this issue along with other aberrant consumption patterns and compliance issues.

Strategic Sourcing
Traditional strategic sourcing programs have been replaced with rapid sourcing and cost reduction efforts, where category experience and supply market knowledge is key to realizing speed to benefits.  Archstone Consulting offers strategic sourcing programs that are based on in-depth category experience and re-usable sourcing templates, supported by e-sourcing tools and techniques, where applicable.

Procure-to-Pay Process Improvement
Efficient and streamlined purchase-to-pay processes are required to gain the full value of a strategic supplier relationship.  Unfortunately, many companies have outdated, one-size-fits-all approaches to their purchasing and payment processes.  Archstone Consulting has experience in helping clients rethink and redesign requisition-to-payment processes to drive both employee productivity and hard-dollar benefits.

Low Cost Country Sourcing (LCCS)
Archstone Consulting provides a full set of services to assist our clients with developing and executing a life cycle approach to low cost country sources of supply.  We assist clients with identifying the right LCCS strategies, identifying LCC suppliers, modeling the total costs of an LCCS program (including logistics, customs, duties, tariffs, taxes and legal issues), establishing an IPO (internal procurement office) or appropriate set of LCCS service providers and other LCCS services.

Procurement Organization Effectiveness and Training
Archstone Consulting believes that effective sourcing and supplier management calls for a procurement organization that is aligned with the business and its needs.  Archstone Consulting has experience in helping its clients develop capability enhancement programs ranging from skills development and training to organizational redesign.

Sourcing Complex Services
Archstone Consulting has developed category knowledge and unique approaches to driving cost savings and improved value from complex services such as legal, marketing, outsourcing and even consulting.  We are helping our clients expand the reach and value of strategic sourcing beyond basic commodities.

Auction and E-Sourcing Services
As the latest trend in purchasing, e-sourcing and reverse auctions have been rapidly adopted by many companies and “shunned” by others.  Archstone Consulting offers un-biased insights and real-world experience in the use of these new tools and techniques.  We understand the limitations and potential of various e-sourcing solutions and can provide assistance in evaluating and adopting these solutions to fit your business requirements.

Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)
In the last decade, many organizations have transformed their supply base through advanced procurement techniques such as strategic sourcing, outsourcing, and low-cost-country sourcing and achieved dramatic savings.   However, companies have found it challenging to effectively manage their new supply environments and deliver further savings and benefits. To maximize the value of their new supply bases, companies are developing a new set of capabilities called Supplier Relationship Management (SRM). The Archstone Consulting team brings a pragmatic approach based on SRM best practices, to support implementations geared towards sustainable benefits in direct, indirect, and outsourced environments, in various functions/businesses, and in both centralized and decentralized organizations. With a toolset rich in templates and accelerators that can be easily tailored, we can improve SRM in multiple environments. We have helped our clients maintain negotiated savings and drive incremental savings; streamline relationships to reduce associated headcount; and create real accountability and incentives for suppliers to deliver business value.

Supplier Risk Management
Archstone Consulting is at the forefront of helping its clients identify, address and mitigate supply base risk, whether the root cause is financial, geopolitical, constrained supply, or supply chain related.