Strategic Sourcing Scrabble

摘要

Through its recent rebranding as the Association for Operations Management, APICS better defines the broad application of the APICS body of knowledge, including purchasing and supply management. Embracing procurement is a good move because strategic sourcing can be as powerful a lever for performance improvement as lean manufacturing, total quality management, demand planning, and similar initiatives that have shaped manufacturing. Strategic sourcing is re-engineering the supplier relationship in a way that achieves breakthrough improvement in cost or performance, enabling the company to reposition itself in relation to its competitors. It starts with a top-level view of a company's externally purchased goods and services—the spend. It prioritizes potential savings by category of spend and determines a sourcing strategy for important categories according to the magnitude of their spend and how hard it is to find, develop, and switch suppliers. The classic mechanism for realizing the savings has been to conduct comprehensive multistage requests for quotes or auctions.