Procurement and Sourcing

In today’s increasingly globalized world, supply chains are highly complex and interdependent and therefore vulnerable to risks, such as geopolitics and natural disasters. For instance, the current tumultuous times have disrupted businesses with suppliers in heavily affected areas and the ongoing threat of tariffs and sanctions have pressured firms to source suppliers elsewhere. Your procurement strategy and framework must be robust while being adaptable to changes and disruptions. Companies the world over are beginning to appreciate the difference that a potent procurement and sourcing strategy can make for their bottom line. 

This is especially true due to the COVID-19 upheaval that is turning the global economy on its head. Simply put, the business world has faced massive disruption in the face of COVID-19, and supply chains across industries are suffering. This new reality often requires additional flexibility on the procurement and sourcing side as companies continue to re-orient their services with new risk management guidelines. Our team at TPG is ready to face this new normal, and our enhanced procurement and sourcing strategies reflect the changing industries. 

At The Poirier Group (TPG), when assessing your procurement and sourcing strategies, we take a deeper look at an organization’s internal needs as well as those of the market, strengthening the relationship of the company and its suppliers. Our supply chain management team then assists in creating contacts globally to provide the most value to organizations in the procurement process. Finally, we rapidly assess the current maturity of product sourcing and tracing initiatives in your organization and recommend specific supply chain improvement-focused initiatives to both reach tracing and sourcing goals and enhance design and measurement. These are the specifics you must dive into in order to form an effective procurement and sourcing strategy.

Our Approach to Procurement and Sourcing Services

Our team creates and implements outsourcing strategies that are robust and flexible while reducing costs, and mitigating foreseeable risks across multiple scenarios. This allows your organization to focus on pressing local initiatives. Meanwhile, our supply chain management team also assures minimal business disruption and conflict with external vendors and organizations through extensive research, analysis and constructive communication.

We work with your team to understand your internal business structures and overall strategic goals to identify improvement opportunities that are aligned with your business and that address the root causes of your procurement and sourcing challenges. Our procurement and sourcing experts work to understand your current state, then help your company streamline processes, minimize risk, reduce raw material prices and costs, and identify better sources of supply to reduce your bottom line and achieve future state goals.

Procurement and Sourcing Service Offerings

The Poirier Group’s procurement expertise includes work in the following strategic and operational areas

Vendor Management

Reducing your organization’s costs through strategic planning and research.

We will help you research and choose the best vendors based on pricing, quality of work, geography, relationship, and risk management, taking into consideration the number of vendors needed, the complexity of your business model, location and other business needs. We will then work with you to set organizational standards for your business and execute a payment schedule.

When doing this manually becomes too much, we will work with you to implement or custom-create a vendor management tool to manage vendor related activities. This can help you control costs and reduce vendor risks. We want you to derive maximum value from your vendors, creating a mutually beneficial relationship with long-term savings.

Sustainable Sourcing & Product Traceability

We work to rapidly assess the current maturity of product sourcing and tracing initiatives in your organization and recommend specific supply chain improvement-focused initiatives to both reach tracing and sourcing goals and enhance design and measurement. As the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing trade war have impacted supply chains, having visibility on where and how your products are sourced is essential to ensuring the right steps are taken to address supplier disruptions.

Supplier Relationship Management

We will explore ways of creating more effective and efficient alliances/connections with key suppliers and work through ways to capitalize on them. We then establish best practices for dealing with suppliers to increase effectiveness. Given that the pandemic and trade wars have been affecting and disrupting supplier operations, creating and upholding a strong supplier relationship is essential to navigating through the change.

Supplier relationships impact multiple functions across your business including in-stock performance, quality of goods and services, technology “fit”, price competitiveness based on cost performance, customer-facing capabilities, and much more. In short, supplier performance (timeliness, cycle time of implementation, responsiveness, knowledge contribution, cost/price, etc.) has a huge impact, directly and indirectly, on your performance with both your customers and employees.