Procurement Management
Keeping corporate procurement “on-message” is often an uphill struggle and achieving a good sustainable vendor spread can also be difficult, in emerging markets especially. On the basis of long experience in emerging markets, Smith & Conquest puts together pre-qualified lists of reliable vendors, providing detailed reports of their suitability. We do this based on SKU and sector, providing you with a supplier list that you can rely on in future tenders.Subsequent to this, Smith & Conquest conducts professional tenders, using tried-and-tested Western tendering methods and non-collusion techniques to ensure that the bids received represent a fair spread of market offerings. The report we put together, after the tender and subsequent vendor interviews and background checks, has proved, in over 88% of cases, to lead to the appointment of vendors retained for a minimum of 2 years with simultaneous achieved client cost savings in excess of 33%
Tender and bid analysis
Analysing bids based on pre-existing tender procedures starts from the vendor background checks that are a Smith & Conquest trademark. Thorough vendor pre-qualification, even in retrospective cases, gives you the assurance that you need that the vendors that have bid are trustworthy, have the financial resources to be able to sustain their supply, have trusted and long-term relationships with their suppliers and staff and have an ownership structure and a relationship network based on honesty and integrity.The analysis of bids covers both soft and hard criteria, weighted according to our clients priorities (set during the procurement briefing phase). The objective here is not to produce a report with “on the one hand, on the other hand” indirectness, but to rate bidders according to agreed criteria and the expert opinion of our procurement professionals.
Contact one of our offices for a sample tender report.
Budgeting
Creating project and procurement budgets is how Smith & Conquest began business, some 15 years ago. Assessing likely costs in fast-growing markets with unfamiliar price structures for international corporations, we were able to quickly develop a sustainable methodology for assessing likely costs, while protecting against inflation and tracking sub-annual price pressures (from suppliers, in relation to raw materials, demand-based pricing, approval and certification processes, etc).Smith & Conquest Sectoral Cost Bulletins track a range of business staples as well as operational SKUs in emerging markets and are widely quoted as an authority on the cost variations of over 200 product categories.
Cashflow forecasts
Based on supplier contracts, related taxation demands and scheduled payment terms, Smith & Conquest compiles detailed cashflow forecasts covering all aspects of your procurement budget, working with your Finance Department to ensure your corporate objectives are met. This work may in itself involve the renegotiation of supplier contracts or the further amendment of agreed payment schedules. It may also involve the restructuring or recategorisation of supplier payments to minimise tax liabilities and reduce avoidable on-costs.Supplier Base Optimisation
The need to regularly reassess and restructure the corporate supplier base is something that many organisations ignore at their peril. This is especially the case in emerging markets where vendors both enter and leave the market frequently, and where vendor ownership structures are often at their most opaque.Smith & Conquest focuses on optimising our clients supplier base to ensure that base corporate objectives are met. Typically those objectives cover the need for quality and dependability of supply, but they relate also to costs and payment terms and the nature of the supplier organisation itself. A supplier who treats your major competitor as a more important client or whose internal confidentiality and integrity are in question can create procurement challenges more serious than those just of cost and timescale.
In the past, Smith & Conquest supplier base optimisation exercises have led to the merging of vendor organisations, as the suppliers took our clients views to heart and understood that to better serve them, and to ensure that they had a value-added client in the longer term, the amalgamation of adjacent areas of supply could lead to real benefits for all parties. This can take place not just in operational or strategic procurement areas but across the supply spectrum.
Supply Chain Management
Managing the operational supply chain is one of the most trusted and vital roles fulfilled by Smith & Conquest. Without a resilient supply chain then even the most otherwise well organised companies can experience crippling problems. Smith & Conquest specialists believe that constructing and maintaining a well-ordered supply chain is a matter of both procurement management but also of focussed planning. Just-in-time production, while common in developed markets, becomes much more risky in the developing markets of Eastern Europe and Asia, where transportation links are more prone to disruption and where the cost of on-site storage is, in many cases, much less than in the countries of Western Europe and the US.Our role is to advise on a supply chain structure that is both resilient to the shocks typical in a fast growing developing market, but also Our role is to advise on a supply chain structure that is both resilient to the shocks typical in a fast growing developing market, but also strong and dependable enough to withstand ownership and strategy changes by the component vendors. Managing that supply chain on an ongoing basis allows us to fine-tune key relationships and improve the corporate bottomline.