Wayne, PA—Oct. 6, 2015—Elemica, a supply chain operating network provider for the process industries, announced its new Sourcing Optimization solution, enabling procurement professionals to make better sourcing decisions, which not only reduce cost, but also improve the entire end-to-end value chain. With the new solution, companies can execute complex sourcing activities alongside supply chain visibility and collaboration efforts with contracted suppliers on the same platform, complementing Elemica’s portfolio of logistics, customer and supplier management solutions.
“The low-hanging fruit is gone,” said Kristie Beck, vice president of product management at Elemica. “Mature sourcing organizations, which have been doing traditional sourcing and category management, are starting to plateau in terms of savings and impact to their organizations, yet each year are faced with increasing savings mandates and pressure to improve performance. Elemica is offering them next-generation sourcing capabilities to help take their business outcomes to the next level.”
At the heart of Elemica’s Sourcing Optimization solution, mathematical optimization algorithms allow users to quickly and efficiently evaluate complex, interdependent bids that have millions of factors, attributes and combinations. As companies move to more complex categories, they at some point realize that their standard e-sourcing tool is not capable of managing large-scale or complex tenders. Furthermore, the use of spreadsheets for data analysis becomes unmanageable for highly complex categories or when sourcing the end-to-end value chain.
Specifically, sourcing strategies that have complex multi-tiered global supply chains contain very large data sets, matrix pricing, total landed cost modeling or significant non-price decision factors, such as supplier innovation capabilities, performance or value-add services difficult to quantify. These are nearly impossible to manage without a tool. Add in operational and business constraints across global organizations, such as plant size, geographic dispersion, capacity, various fulfillment options and more, and it becomes very difficult to analyze all of these interdependent variables effectively in a spreadsheet.
“This next frontier of sourcing takes into consideration today’s real-world complexity, is unconstrained by a near infinite variety of factors or volume of data and, ultimately, focuses on making superior data-led decisions based on the entire value chain,” adds Ms. Beck.
Elemica’s new Sourcing Optimization solution is an ideal fit for organizations looking to source across the supply chain to capture more value, both in savings and operational synergies, from their sourcing strategies. Benefits include:
- High flexibility, which enables practitioners to custom design requests for information, quotation or proposal (RFIs, RFQs or RFPs), and auctions to fit the needs of the categories being sourced. There is no more trying to fit your bid into your e-sourcing solution.
- Extreme complexity management, which evaluates value chain costs in which there are various cost and non-cost factors, such as one tender that incorporates material costs, labor costs, distribution and transportation costs, warranties and more.
- Powerful analysis, which calculates non-cost parameters and scoring defined by the user to be utilized in bid evaluation. Upon bid receipt, users can create unlimited what-if scenarios to quantify savings tradeoffs based on their own unique business constraints.
- Fast results, which reduces project cycle times from months to weeks compared to Excel-based analytics.
