Elemica Blog

Aggregation Project for Translation Services

"Translation" could have a different meaning for everybody. For individual usage, maybe it is nothing more than “google translate”. However, for organizations it can be a complex activity with workflows, systems and processes developed to support multilingual needs.

In an international business environment, companies need to provide communications in the native language of global customers, business partners and employees. This requires translation in several language combinations for different types of media (i.e documents, leaflets, websites) and for a variety of content (marketing, financial, legal, technical).

Sourcing the Answer

Since it’s difficult to hire enough Procurement experts to be able to revisit and re-bid every category of indirect material every year, or even every three or four years, many of Elemica’s clients are considering the use of external resources to augment their own Sourcing staff.

Aggregating Accommodation Spend

Sourcing indirect materials and services for categories with multi-year contracts is always a challenge to purchasing organizations, especially categories tendered every 3 to 5 years. The market place changes very rapidly and new opportunities arise every year, sometimes so often it is difficult to keep up. However, this doesn’t have to be your reality.

A Key Differentiator to Look For?

You have probably heard some recurring reasons why companies use outside consultants for certain professional services such as sourcing. Most commonly you hear the following:

Elemica can complement existing resources: When planning, building, or executing  your strategic sourcing plans, one of the first questions asked  is what skill sets are required to get this done? Depending on the answer it may not be cost effective to maintain these skill sets internally if they are not part of the core mission of your company, or if they are readily available externally at a reasonable cost. Elemica provides cost effective, skilled sourcing resources for sourcing activities. These resources can fill your skill set gaps if they exists, or provide a competitively priced alternative to bringing them in house.

Elemica can supplement existing capacity: Once the needed skill sets have been identified, if they do not exist in house, you will probably need to engage an outside service. Even if the skill sets exist internally, they may already be committed and not available in the time frame that you need them. To go out and hire what you need will take longer and can be a permanent addition to your overhead. Elemica provides the resources you need now and can be used for a limited engagement at a known fixed cost.  

Complement and supplement are recurring themes for using Elemica Sourcing Services, but recently another scenario has proved to bring outstanding value to our customers...

A Small Step Towards Vendor Managed Inventory

For decades organisations have been aiming to be more lean and efficient by offloading or outsourcing non-core activities. The ongoing economic crisis is most likely powering this trend. But that is more than just a fashion, with numerous small and large scale outsourcing initiatives the expectations have become more realistic. In the field of procurement, it’s a small step towards Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) with outsourcing the order management or even strategic sourcing somewhere on the other side of the spectrum. So how do I create value for my organisation? What is the optimum?

Solutions for Buyers and Suppliers for this Historically Challenging Raw Material

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Click here to view this post in traditional Chinese.

Natural rubber inventory management has long proved troublesome for buyers and suppliers alike. With production geographically dispersed from delivery locations, inventory management of natural rubber has had to confront long lead times, difficulties in tracking, and high operating costs.

Elemica has developed, in partnership with our natural rubber network, an inventory system which mitigates the problems of natural rubber distribution and offers key advantages over traditional inventory methods. Initially targeted towards Asia-Pacific, our inventory approach provides better inventory tracking and warehouse-to-factory distribution than is available with traditional methods. This service is delivered via Elemica's QuickLink Portal solution which provides access to Elemica’s network of buyers, suppliers, and carriers. Supporting multiple languages and currencies, Elemica's QuickLink Network allows our clients to expand their trading partner relationships and transact business globally.

Patently This Cannot Be Correct

Anyone who has spent any time with me knows that I went to a British, all male, naval boarding school. My wife claims that the trauma of it explains my love of musical theatre, shoe shopping and pink drinks (current favourite is equal measures of Vanilla Vodka, Orange Juice and Cranberry Juice).

We used to do parades where you had 700 boys marching around a big square on a cold February Sunday morning wearing Naval uniforms. There is an apocryphal story of a mother watching the parade and then questioning loudly “why is everybody out of step, except for my son Johnnie”.

Round Table from Different Industries to Collaboratively Discuss Managing the Tail End Spend

Elemica recently organized a Round Table with six organizations from different industries participating to collaboratively discuss how to manage the tail end of your spend. Using the Pareto principle to define the tail, it includes the 20% of your spend supplied by 80% of your suppliers. This typically excludes the raw materials and CAPEX from the tail spend and includes consumables like MRO and PPE.

Does the effort pay off?

Elemica Hosts an Exciting Round Table with Blue Chip Customers

At the beginning of July Elemica held an exciting round table discussion in Amsterdam among some of our blue chip companies to define the best practices regarding the purchase of merchandising products.

Many of the buyers, who have been confronted to source such products at one point, have found it to be a big headache. Purchasing atypical creative products issued from marketing in a time constraint is a real challenge. We uncovered how companies have best met these ambitious goals and remained ahead of the demand!

The main topics of the discussion were set on:

Global media’s focus on slow down to frenetic pace of economic growth in China seems to be overdone

Based on customer discussions this past week in China, the global media’s focus on the slow down to the frenetic pace of economic growth in China seems to be overdone.  While the double digit growth rates of the past few years have moved to a high single digit rate, the general feeling is this level is much more sustainable both for companies and society at large.  Our customers continue to focus on sourcing innovation – moving beyond pursuit of the lowest price supply source – to a total cost of ownership perspective.  This is not surprising as the pressures of higher labor costs, tighter credit standards and increasing quality requirements impacts Chinese suppliers and their customers equally. 

Bidding Telecom Services and Hardware

One category many Elemica customers have put out to bid is telecom services and hardware, and for many it is a painful project. Since most eSourcing platforms are not configured for this niche category, procurement professionals find themselves spending a lot of time doing analysis in spreadsheets in an effort to compare apples to apples.

From the Front Lines of the Elemica Sourcing Team

It is not uncommon to find savings of 20% or more in indirect material and facility service categories when strategically sourced. This is especially true when the timing is right. A few categories we see trending right now include a variety of facility management services and a formerly "untouchable" spend category. What category is that you may ask? It's marketing.

More on these two particular areas;